this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Six months in, journalist-owned tech publication 404 Media is profitable (www.niemanlab.org)
submitted 6 months ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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of note:

The 404 team DIYs as much as possible. They pay for hosting through Ghost and set up litigation insurance, for example, but everyone makes their own art for stories instead of paying for agency photos. (The reporters are also the merch models). Everyone works from home, so they don’t have an office and don’t plan on getting one anytime soon. The team communicates through a free Slack channel. Koebler mails out merchandise from his garage in Los Angeles. Every month, the team meets (virtually) to decide how much they can pay themselves. (The number changes each month, but everyone gets paid the same amount.)

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[–] SilverShark@beehaw.org 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The team of 404 had to hide their content so it isn't easily used by content mills. The AI content mills are starting to become a very big thing. There is a podcast called Gadget Lab by WIRED, and last episode was about an interview made to a guy that owns several of these content mills. The guy claims he understands that what he is doing is bad, since he is churning out this kind of content that is likely to be full of mistakes and false information, and also claims that a team of people review the content before actually publishing it.

This is also being done via domain squatting, in which people buy old domains of blogs that were known, and start a new blog full of AI generated content in it.