Journalist

“You know, I found two new AI phrases. I don't remember both of them, but one of them is in our increasingly online world, when someone's writing about online culture, or something that happened on the internet, or, like, with the boom of social media, like, th…”

“My disagree with biology is that I don't think you should be antagonistic to reporters. There's no reason to, like, you can actually be friends with them, and they can be positive towards you. You can help them out. They're just humans at the end of the day, a…”

“Now we have an equal amount of journalists and traditional analysts. Their job is to take the opposite view by default. Journalists are pretty good at that. I've learned a lot hanging out with journalists. Half the team is journalists who basically criticize e…”

“The art of journalism is you talk to a bunch of people and some of them lie to you and you figure out what's true. So as long as the journalist treats the AI as yet another unreliable source, they're actually better equipped to work with AI than most other pro…”

“AI is going to replace translators. It's going to replace most journalists because it does good research. It can write good copy, whatever, not, not elite journalism. It's not going to be able to replace all the writers.”

“I think journalists get personnel related matters. Pretty wrong most of the time, and I think it's because at the end of the day, these decisions and dynamics are like two people in a room, and even the closest people right outside that room could have their t…”

“And I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant and that don't get talked about. He actually called up journalists. Sometimes, and tested ideas on them, and like, we might do this kind of thing, and then hear the journalists react to it, and it's lik…”

“And from a media point of view, when journalists see that and they kind of get the sense of, oh, this is AI, they hit delete because journalists are reading to delete. They get about a hundred to 200 pitches each day, and they are just trying to get to the goo…”

“I kind of like the pitch that starts off super short, it's about 10 words, and it gives me, this is new, And this is important. And it's compelling enough for me to read the second line. And if it's compelling enough for me to read the second line, I think, ok…”

“The journalist is a con man because they'll always write this email to you, which is like fluffing you up and flattering you and saying how great you are, blah, blah, blah, and pretending that they come in under flag of Parley, they get their quote, if you're …”

“The ban on outbound links meant that suddenly X became the place you just go for the information, and you don't go to the journos anymore, right? So he stripped their status, he stripped their control over the central stream of media, he stripped their traffic…”

“Build your own distribution to avoid distortion, ok? That is to say, any content you have, it should be posted on your feeds. Why would you go and feed it to some journo? You've got some scoop. You don't need them for distribution anymore.”

“The communists and the journalists are the same, but I repeat myself, right?”

“The journals only get traffic for their articles when they get rage views from us.”

“Why they go after Uber, right? They didn't want another trillion dollar company, certainly not a libertarian one. Why they go after VCs? They're the ones distributing capital. If they go after these nexus points, these critical nodes, they could try to hit tho…”

“We did this thing intuitively by freezing them out, of quotes, not talking to them, and posting the stuff ourselves. Now, they're just reduced to bloggers. Now, they're not sourced.”

“I think the one difference is that there is more money that flows directly from firms to journalists in China. So the sort of discount factor that you have to apply to Chinese technology coverage is, Specifically positive technology coverage or even negative t…”

“Initially, some people inside the company were suggesting like, Hey, why don't you have journalists or, you know, some select group be the first participants, but Very specifically, we're like, no, that's like, we're trying to move away from the idea of curate…”

“Journalists are realizing that they can make more on their own, which is why there's so many companies really that are popping off for these journalists to be able to exit the legacy media and essentially be their own reporter, right?”

“I would say for those who, like, worked for Legacy Media and, like, don't have an audience, and that Legacy Media was one that, like, America doesn't trust it's going to be very hard to gain the trust of Americans to want to subscribe to them.”

“That is also something I hear a lot from, and we could just call them industry leaders. We don't even have to, you know, we can call them industry leaders in tech right now. Is, you know, I bring up this, they point out that there are bad journalists, but they…”

“I've been courting hit pieces with journalists for the last couple of weeks, talking to them just freely, just on the record, just ripping quotes, just saying whatever.”

“I do think that the bar of expertise and sophistication that journalists have to meet in their coverage is getting higher and higher, and that's like a good thing. Like, people often Talk about, like, the impact of the substack economy and all these expert opi…”

“There is something very Unique and bizarre in formula one that the journalists are very rarely, very skeptical of formula one or will never say anything too heavy about formula one for fear of losing their credentials.”

“Conversations with journalists aren't conversations, they're interviews. You're kind of entering into the arena, and you have to be prepared for that”

“Journalists are entrepreneurial in many ways in how they operate, but very few of them think about starting a business. They don't have that perspective for a variety of reasons.”

“Nine 11 was actually a big moment for blogs, and it's when, the way I would describe it, it's when journalists started taking them seriously.”

“And so I think cold outreach done well is just as effective.”

“Especially if you don't have hard news that you're pitching, having something like pretty controversial to say. So like we work with a lot of AI companies, if nine of them, you know, have one stance on, you know, something happening in the field and one has th…”

“You have to find your own process of finding the truth today, because I don't think you can trust the journalists out there to do it.”

“Every journalist that wants to survive as a journalist has to go independent in the next 10 years.”

“My view is every single journalist knows that Twitter has never driven traffic to stories. It is so much about just ego.”

“The editor, the writer, they, like, I'll just say it as plainly as possible. They don't care about you. They don't care about you. They care about their reader, or their listener, or their viewer. That's who they care about. That's who they're serving. And if …”

“A good journalist, a good media, a good writer, is not actually sitting around thinking that their job is to wait for people to pitch them so that they can just write about the best pitches. Their job, as they see it, is to go and find the most useful things f…”

“The more you try to control it, The more the reporter is going to be annoyed at you, and the more, in fact, the reporter might try to, like, take a shot at you in the story as a result, because they just, they found you too controlling, because they felt like …”

“It always made me as a journalist somewhat uncomfortable to be part of like seeing like just journalists, like standing up and cheering. Not that people can't acknowledge the company, but it's very unusual. People don't cheer at press conferences.”

“If the person has responded to you once, now they have a relationship with you, even if it's a very marginal relationship, but before they had zero relationship to you. So it's very easy to ignore an email that you've never responded to before, but if you've r…”

“Embargo means that you tell journalists they can only publish something at a specific time on a specific date. And if you're able to do that, then you can get all of the new sources to publish something at the same time. And that's magical because you create a…”

“I would say that most journalists, not at the top publications, but you would be surprised with most journalists. Tend to be fairly lazy. And I don't fault journalists. They have way too many things to do. They're trying to click, you know, get clicks. They ar…”

“You can't have control and tell a journalist, I want you to write this or that, because I actually will rub them in an incredibly the wrong way, much like when you're working with an engineer and you tell them like, here's the solution I want you to build vers…”

“Unlike you talking to a journalist, et cetera, it's truly a conversation one, and the second part is, There's enough time to actually elaborate on the thought and the idea. Whereas you have to be so succinct in how you express your idea and truly get it across…”

“The best writers I know are not people that came up as journalists. The best writers are former industry people. Like, I mean, who's going to outright community stuff or what your expertise is, right? Like you're going to be the best about that. Like, A journa…”

“Basically, one of the genetic flaws in journalists is that they're not great writers, and they often bury what matters, and they often hide it in a vomit of words.”

“My honest to God view on this, and it may be deeply cynical, is that I think what has happened, the reason why there's so much heat and so much drama around this is because Two journalists, Twitter's very, very important, and they had a very special status und…”

“What journalists need to realize is that today's conspiracy theories are tomorrow's Pulitzer Prizes.”

“The Twitter spaces yesterday did a better job of trying to ask questions and getting to the truth than a single journalist has done, or the collective body of all of journalists.”

“One of the problems with journalism today is even if you're doing reporting in good faith, Chamath, and you put your byline on there, harassment, you know, threats, et cetera, can become very acute if you're just covering certain topics. And so I actually thin…”

“And so then what happens is how is follower count on Twitter actually derived? How do you get that follow account by being tribal? And so what's happened is journalists have became tribal, they get big followings, they give spicy takes, they pick a side, and t…”

“I, now looking back on it, I think we had between five and 35% of a story, and I know that's, like, probably triggering to a lot of journalists that they have that little information.”

“The thing that's going to happen, I guess, is as deep fakes and other, other kinds of media come out that make it really impossible to distinguish between what is being said and what is not. We're going to, again, just as we did before any video existed, We're…”

“Too many CEOs think that like marketers can convince PR people and journalists to write about anything. And the reality is journalists don't give a shit about your product unless it is truly doing something innovative or unless it's breaking rules and they'll …”

“I believe there's four PR people for every journalist now. I suspect it's even higher in the financial industry.”

“We're already also seeing authoritarian governments adopt this law into their own into their own legal systems to silence dissent and to go after journalists who are publishing so-called fake news and whatnot.”

“But also go back to journalists are not making use of technology. They're not gathering information. They're not doing things in a smart way. They're still doing things the way we've been doing them for 40 or 50 years.”

“I mean, I find it personally interesting, but I think that it's, you It is a, it's a dangerous thing to bring into contact with journalists of certain types.”

“I think the biggest PR hack you can do is to not hire a PR firm. Just pick three or four journalists that you develop really close relationships with, that like you, that understand you, that you get. And then you contact them yourself. They will cover every s…”

“Instead of sending out to journalists the our, like, the crowd flower analysis, we actually sent them the data and kind of let them draw their own conclusions.”