We keep an eye out for the most interesting stories about Labby subjects: digital media, startups, the web, journalism, strategy, and more. Here’s some of what we’ve seen lately.
March 24, 2025
“The communities desk covered stories to address the ‘longtime neglect and misrepresentation of marginalized communities,’ per its mission statement. It was among a slate of DEI initiatives the Inquirer created in 2020 … Half of the eight newsroom staff offered buyouts are people of color.” —
Axios / Isaac Avilucea
/ Mar 24March 23, 2025
“The majority of the suspended accounts were ‘university-associated activist accounts, basically sharing protest information, locations for students to go,’ according to Yusuf Can, coordinator and analyst at the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program. Many of these accounts are ‘grassroots activists’ with their followings in the low tens of thousands, said Can.” —
Politico / Eliza Gkritsi
/ Mar 23March 21, 2025
Bard is acquiring Lapham’s Quarterly at no cost —
New York Times / Benjamin Mullin
/ Mar 21“TechCrunch has been subject to several ownership changes over the past few years. It was pulled under the Yahoo umbrella after its former parent AOL and Yahoo were acquired by Verizon and subsequently sold to Apollo as one entity in 2021.” —
March 20, 2025
“I’m just going to say it: This isn’t normal. And it’s about more than just Blake Lively.” —
Glamour / Stephanie McNeal
/ Mar 20OpenAI argued that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.” —
The Verge / Emma Roth
/ Mar 20“Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was ‘really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,’ as ‘books are actually more important than web data.’ Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from ‘MZ’—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.” —SS
The Atlantic / Alex Reisner
/ Mar 20“When Substack took off in 2020 amid the
newsletter boom — which
came and went, then came back
again, perhaps this time for good — it positioned itself as an email service. But in the years since, Substack has transformed into something else: a platform for live videos and podcasts, a burgeoning social-media network, and a starter pack for fledgling newsrooms. Every day for the past six weeks, Acosta has been filming himself talking about the horrors of Trump’s second term and posting the video on Substack. To his surprise, there’s an audience for it. Each episode gets between 150,000 and 200,000 views and he has amassed about 280,000 subscribers, more than 10,000 of which are paid.”
—Intelligencer / Charlotte Klein
/ Mar 20“Liu notes in a post on Bluesky that the change came about because newsrooms were seeing engagement from likes and reposts in the app but had a harder time determining how that was translating into ‘actual website traffic.'” —SC
TechCrunch / Sarah Perez
/ Mar 20“The Associated Press is among publishers seeing ‘some concerning trends’ around advertisers being wary of working with news providers in the current political news cycle.” —
Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
/ Mar 20
