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Axios Media to Be Bought by Cox Enterprises for $525 Million – BNN

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(Bloomberg) — The online news company Axios Media Inc. agreed to be bought by Cox Enterprises Inc., the latest in a recent flurry of digital deals by traditional media companies.

The deal valued the company at $525 million, Axios said Monday. The company’s three founders will continue to hold substantial stakes and will lead editorial and day-to-day business decisions.

The Washington, D.C.-area news site, which was launched by former Politico staffers in 2017, brought Cox in as an investor in November. Axios has been expanding its coverage increasingly beyond the Beltway, including the launch of local newsletters in more than a dozen cities.

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Last August, German media giant Axel Springer SE agreed to buy Politico in a deal said to be valued at more than $1 billion. Around the same time, Nexstar Media Group Inc. acquired The Hill, which focuses on political news, for $130 million.

Axios Chief Executive Officer Jim VandeHei told the New York Times the founders opted to sell now because Cox offered a fair price, allowing early investors like NBCUniversal and Emerson Collective to get a substantial return.

The company’s 2022 revenue is projected to be more than $100 million, a person familiar with the deal told the Times.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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DJT Stock Jumps. The Truth Social Owner Is Showing Stockholders How to Block Short Sellers. – Barron's

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DJT Stock Jumps. The Truth Social Owner Is Showing Stockholders How to Block Short Sellers.  Barron’s

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Taylor Swift's new album allegedly 'leaked' on social media and it's causing a frenzy – CTV News

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Social media can be a divisive place, but even more so when it comes to Taylor Swift.

A Google Drive link allegedly containing 17 tracks that are purportedly from Swift’s eagerly awaited “The Tortured Poets Department” album has been making the rounds on the internet in the past day and people are equal parts mad, sad and happy about it.

CNN has reached out to Swift’s representative for comment.

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The actual album is slated to drop at midnight Friday, but the claimed leak is both being hailed and nailed by Swift’s supporters.

One person shared a drawing of a young woman asleep in a sparkly bed with sparkly blankets on X, writing, “How I slept last night knowing I’m going to hear TTPD for the very first time tonight cause I haven’t listened to any leaks.”

Yet another person posted a video of two models walking and wrote, “Me and my bestie on our way to listen to #TSTTPD leaks.”

On Thursday, “Taylor Swift leaks” was a prevented search phrase on X.

The general consensus among those who have decided to be “leak free” appears to be that they are the true Swifties – as her hard core fan base is known – because they don’t believe the singer would have sanctioned such a “leak.”

Swift herself has gone to great lengths to prevent unintended early releases in the past.

“I have a lot of maybe, maybe-not-irrational fears of security invasion, wiretaps, people eavesdropping,” Swift said of her music during an 2014 appearance on” Jimmy Kimmel Live.” She added that her “1989” album only existed on her phone, “covered in cat stickers and the volume buttons don’t work very well because there’s candy stuck in there,” for nearly two years.

“The Tortured Poets Department” is Swift’s 11th album and comes after she became the first woman and only solo artist to win the Grammy for album of the year three times.

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Media mogul Randi Zuckerberg says creators should disclose when they've used AI to produce work – The Globe and Mail

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Randi Zuckerberg says she thinks creators should start disclosing when they’ve used artificial intelligence to produce work because it’s “becoming harder and harder to tell what’s real.”

The tech leader behind Facebook Live META-Q, who left the social media giant in 2011 and has since founded a company that connects digital art makers with collectors, said she’d like to see news organizations note when they have used AI to write articles or even credit the technology in a byline.

Academics could offer similar levels of transparency, which might spur a pattern of disclosure across several industries, she added.

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If this approach becomes the norm, “consumers can learn to be a little more savvy about what’s real and what’s not real,” Zuckerberg said in an interview on the sidelines of the Ontario Centre of Innovation’s DiscoveryX conference in Toronto on Wednesday.

“Certainly, I think, it’s an issue that keeps a lot of us up at night.”

The issue of misinformation has proliferated in recent years. About six in ten Canadians told Statistics Canada last year that they were “very or extremely concerned” about online misinformation, while 43 per cent felt it was getting harder to decipher online truth from fiction compared with three years earlier.

AI has turbocharged the problem by making it faster, cheaper and easier to deceive people with fake or doctored images, audio clips and videos. In the last year or so alone, it’s been used to spread fake explicit images of pop star Taylor Swift, depict the pope wearing a puffy coat and mislead people into believing Canadian TV host Mary Berg was arrested.

Social media companies like Facebook, which Zuckerberg’s brother Mark Zuckerberg started, have found themselves on the front lines of dealing with misinformation.

While Randi Zuckerberg is unsure how receptive the corporate world would be to the level of AI disclosure she is encouraging, she thinks it’s important to start the conversation.

Those engaged in the topic will have to decide whether disclosure means sharing what AI bots or programs they used or even what prompts produced their creations.

“There are a lot of smarter people with experience in AI, law and copyright who are thinking through these things on a deeper level,” she said.

“But I do imagine that we’ll see a world where at least some of these things need to be referenced right now.”

Even if there is disclosure, Zuckerberg said, people will be left with deciding how they feel about “the soul of content.”

“Would you listen to a podcast if you knew that there were no humans behind it?” she questioned. “Would you hang art on your walls that was entirely created by AI that a human never touched?

Zuckerberg, who invested in the hit theatrical production “Dear Evan Hansen,” said she’s thought about these questions a lot and has decided she’d be comfortable throwing AI-generated art on her wall.

“If something’s beautiful, does it matter who created it?” she reasoned.

At the same time as the globe is grappling with AI, some regions are also experiencing challenges around access to credible news.

In Canada, the recent enactment of Bill C-18, known as the Online News Act, has required Google and Facebook and Instagram-owner Meta Platforms Inc. to enter into agreements that compensate Canadian media companies when their content is posted or repurposed by the platforms.

In response, Google, which threatened to block Canadian news from its products, agreed in November to make annual payments to news companies collectively totalling $100-million. Meta took the opposite approach, removing Canadian news from its platforms.

Asked about platforms dropping news, Zuckerberg said, “so much of the world has kind of gone to algorithms in some way.”

“But news is a tricky one because then it just surfaces things that keep us in an echo chamber,” she said, referencing a term used to describe when platforms serve content to individuals that reaffirms their existing views rather than challenging them.

“News is almost the one category where you want to deliver content to people that’s kind of outside their rhythm to challenge their thinking a little more or expand their horizons,” Zuckerberg continued.

“That’s the part of this that we’re missing that I hope we can figure out.”

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