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This week we hear from Lauren Kleinman and Lee Joselowitz, co-founders of The Quality Edit. The Quality Edit was founded in 2021 when Lauren, Lee and their co-founder Scott Silver felt there was no digital publisher providing high-quality recommendations around fashion, travel, and beauty products, so they decided to launch their own.
The timing of this going live is interesting given last week there was a story from HouseFresh about how independent review sites are struggling on Google compared to bigger media publishers who are “inundating the web with subpar product recommendations you can’t trust” in pursuit of easy affiliate revenue.
It’s a fascinating case study of a brand which is launching relatively late in what I assumed was a crowded market. But as Lauren points out, they couldn’t find a publication which was covering new and exciting products authentically which they themselves would want to read.
By the end of last year, nearly half of the most widely used news websites across the 10 countries studied were blocking OpenAI’s crawlers. I’m slightly surprised this is so high, and so far, none of them have reversed their decision. But only 24% are blocking Google’s AI crawler.
Have you made the decision to block AI crawlers? Why, or why not? Start a conversation in our community forum.
On the one hand, this is an entirely sensible use of AI, given the amount of content that is shared or repurposed across Reach sites. Some of the stories even have a label saying it was reviewed by an editor. In theory, it’ll free up those talented local news journalists to go into their communities and do deeper reporting, rather than having to write 6+ stories a day. Right? Right.
This is from earlier in February but has only just hit my reading list. Pearls of wisdom from Adam Tinworth include: “All this talk of “gatekeepers” and “platforms” disguises the brutal truth: we let other companies come between us and our audience. We can’t afford to make that mistake again.”
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