Blog

This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed or just bookmark loudpoet.com and check in now and then. You do you!

NOTE: Bookshop.org has free shipping during their “Anti-Prime Sale” (July 8-11), and I have a few lists there with mostly backlist recommendations across poetry, fiction, comics, and nonfiction. Skip Amazon and treat yourself to a good book or three while supporting indie bookstores at the same time!

_ONE

Americans still have faith in local news — but few are willing to pay for it | Jennifer Hoewe

When people no longer have access to local news sources, or they stop following local news coverage, their faith in the integrity of local elections decreases, their ability to assess elected officials is worse, and voter turnout is lower in local elections, compared with those who do follow, read, watch, or listen to local news.

Hoewe cobbles together several sources to argue her point, which I instinctively agree with despite her stretching interpretations a bit to define “trust” and connect the dots. The major national news outlets are increasingly useless for trustworthy journalism in general, never mind local coverage, and where actual local news outlets still exist, it’s often either a declining asset in some larger conglomerate’s news portfolio (*barf emoji*); a weekly paper that lacks the resources to consistently do investigative journalism that makes politicians accountable for their actions; or a programmatic ad-supported collection of questionably sourced clickbait and “Things to do this Weekend” articles, both increasingly “generated” by AI prompts and old school plagiarism.

We finally lost the print edition of our big “local” newspaper (The Star-Ledger) earlier this year, and while its online parent (NJ.com) isn’t terrible, it’s often a firehose that makes truly local news hard to find, making a paid subscription seem less valuable every day. Meanwhile, our hyper-local newspaper is a well-intentioned step above a High School operation that frequently lacks any useful news about local politics — in print or online. They completely failed to cover the recent Democratic primaries for our mayor, who had a surprise challenger with zero media coverage. They also didn’t cover the Governor’s primary, which was particularly egregious since Ras Baraka, mayor of neighboring Newark, wasn’t endorsed by his colleague, which definitely should have been newsworthy for us. My subscription recently expired after nearly 10 years, and I don’t plan on renewing it.

Fortunately, I’ve recently discovered two online sources that have been filling the state-level gap in my newsfeed: NJ Spotlight and The New Jersey Monitor. They’re not as broad as NJ.com, by design; they’re more focused, and their newsletters are more consistently relevant as a result. Neither have traditional paid subscriptions but they do take donations, and I’m almost ready to add them alongside WFMU as important local media I financially support on an ongoing basis. (NJ Spotlight is part of NJ PBS, so it might be in more immediate need of support as Trump, et al attempt to dismantle everything.)

__TWO

New Jersey removes mandate to publish legal notices in newspapers | Sophie Nieto-Munoz

The measure comes after the Star-Ledger, the state’s largest daily newspaper, announced it would cease printing in February, along with other smaller papers the company owns. That left several municipalities and counties without an official newspaper to publish notices of town meetings, planning board applications, foreclosures, and bid solicitations, as mandated under the state’s Open Public Meetings Act.

One thing I noticed over the past year or so with our hyper-local newspaper was how much advertising they were carrying from legal notices. It was less obvious in The Star-Ledger, but I would have expected their exit from print would have shifted more of that advertising to hyper-local newspapers, which could have helped bolster their resources and expand and improve their coverage.

I try not to entertain conspiracy theories, but it seems awfully convenient that politicians on both sides of the aisle would support moving these notices online — where they will be easily segregated and go mostly unseen — rather than prioritizing the health of local news outlets.

___THREE

Spotify AI band controversy — who is The Velvet Sundown and are they real?| Tammy Rogers

There will be a very real person (or people) behind “The Velvet Sundown.” An AI model can’t (yet) make this all unprompted for itself, as you might imagine. Yet there are lots of questions to be asked about AI music on streaming apps beyond the latest band on the block.

This story was inevitable and is only noteworthy for why The Velvet Sundown stood out from the other “ghost artists” Spotify pushes to avoid paying real artists fractions of a penny for their music.

I haven’t used Spotify in years, but I was a long-time user of Google Play Music (and then YouTube Music) and enjoyed several “curated” playlists, some of which I’d combine into larger playlists of my own. They’d often play in the background, and I’d have no idea who most of the artists were unless a song really caught my attention and I looked them up. I’m pretty sure I don’t have any fake artists on those lists, but the algorithm was flattening the range of music I was hearing so much that it all started to sound the same, so I’m not convinced I’d have even noticed.

Earlier this year, I shifted most of my music streaming to WFMU (via their excellent Android app), where trusted DJs purposefully select and shout-out the songs and artists they’re playing. I’ve also slowly started rebuilding my CD collection for more intentional listening, and to make sure I actually own and pay for the music I enjoy.

As I’ve said many times before, the only thing that’s inevitable about AI is people with vested interests trying to force it on the rest of us while aggressively devaluing craft and creativity. We all still have agency and can choose to avoid it as much as possible, though. Taking back control over your music should be one of the easier places to start, while proactively informing yourself why AI hype is bullshit so you can resist it even when it’s a more personally challenging situation.

____FOUR

What AI money says about the environmental cost | L. Rhodes

The examples could continue ad nauseam, but that would be asinine. Let’s stop bullshitting ourselves and one another: AI companies clearly expect their technology to consume much, much more energy than existing cloud computing infrastructure, and they expect that consumption to continue for decades into the future. If they tell you otherwise, they’re lying, and you can tell they’re lying by the billions of dollars they’re pouring into constructing city-sized datacenters with their own multi-gigawatt power stations.

Always follow the money. (And if you’re on Mastodon, follow Rhodes; this blog post started there.) 10/10, no notes.

_____FIVE

X is for… | Adam Green

How did they represent the letter X before X-rays? Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of “xylophone”) until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?

This isn’t about the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, but the actual letter X and how it was represented in alphabet books throughout history. Some of the examples are creative (Extinct) and funny (XX ale), and it’s a perfect palate cleanser if, like me, you’re annoyed that you can’t seem to escape reading about some new AI-related nonsense every day. (No, I’m not linking to X’s latest nonsense because that’s the most predictable example yet.)

______BONUS

PS: If you’re reading this somewhere other than your inbox and would like to get it via email, sign up here.