Your ✅ Monday briefing: Wishing you a happy and relaxing summer
The Wadds Inc. newsletter is taking a break for the summer holidays and will be back Monday 4 September
This newsletter is curated weekly from conversations in our House of Marketing & PR community of practice. You’d be welcome to join the 3,000 members. We’d also appreciate you sharing the newsletter with friends and colleagues who may be interested in subscribing.
Thanks to Alan Morrison, Andy Barr, Claire Munro, James Poulter, Andrew Bruce Smith, and Sarah Waddington CBE for sharing the stories featured this week. The newsletter is taking a break for the summer. We’ll be back on Monday 4 September. We hope that you have a happy and relaxing summer.
Media
📰 VINYL INSPIRATION: NME is making a limited-edition return to print, riding vinyl's resurgence. This move mirrors the revival of retro aesthetics and analogue media that are taking hold in the modern digital age. More information: Press Gazette.
📲 GEN Z NEWS: OFCOM reports that social media channels, especially Instagram, are preferred news sources for Gen Z over traditional platforms. It indicates a significant shift in the media landscape, challenging the conventional role of broadcast and print media. More information: OFCOM.
✍️ AI REPORTERS: Google is testing Genesis, an AI tool that generates news articles and could be a personal assistant for journalists. Newsrooms are grappling with AI in reporting; however, concerns remain about accuracy and fact-checking. More information: New York Times.
Artificial intelligence
🤖 FACEBOOK AI: Meta has made its AI model Llama 2, open source for public use. The large language model is available for download to run a privately hosted systems. It could disrupt Microsoft Bard and OpenAI ChatGPT, which both charge. The Hugging Face AI community has launched a third-party web-hosted version. More information: Facebook.
👤 MEMORY UPGRADE: ChatGPT can now remember previous prompt sessions. It eliminates the need for repetition and retraining each time you use the application. It’s not available in the UK or the European Union yet. More information: The Verge.
💰 AI PRICING: Microsoft plans to charge $30 per user per month for enterprise access to its CoPilot AI, which will sit alongside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Bing Chat will be priced at $5 per user. Both tools address privacy and security concerns. More information: Microsoft.
🔎 AI UNDERSTANDING: The developers who create AI models struggle to understand their operations. It underscores AI's complexity and unpredictability, highlighting the need for robust oversight and ethical considerations. More information: Vox.
✒️ WRITING AID: A study reports that ChatGPT assists writers in completing tasks faster and improving the quality of their work. It sheds light on the potential of AI as a tool to enhance human creativity and productivity. More information: Technology Review.
Good and bad practice
⛽️ FUEL FURY: Asda faced criticism from a Parliamentary business and trade committee meeting for not providing clear answers about the supermarket's fuel prices, financials, and employee treatment. The CMA accused Asda of taking advantage of market volatility to delay passing on falling diesel wholesale prices to consumers. More information: Retail Gazette.
📖 ORGANIZATIONAL LISTENING: Organizational Listening by Jim Macnamara is a comprehensive assessment of how institutions, including governments and businesses, fail to listen to their publics effectively, and the damage that results. Its analysis of the ethics of listening is timely, given the current interest in cases of social listening, often dubbed spying by mainstream media. More information: Wadds Inc.
Tools
🐦 TWITTER TEAMS: Twitter has announced a tool called Delegates as a replacement for TweetDeck Teams. It enables account permissions to be assigned to other users, making it easier to manage your workflow. More information: Social Media Today.
We’ve raised £25,000 over the last couple of years with Hadrian’s Wall and Three Peaks summer fundraisers. Thank you to everyone who has supported us.
This year we’ve set out sights on the more modest challenge of running the Great North Run for Winston's Wish. It supports children and their families following the death of a parent or sibling. It’s been a huge support to us over the past six months.
We appreciate that times are tough, but we’d be grateful for any donation that you can make. £5 would be great. £10 would be amazing. Thank you.