The Weekly Bulletin | May 27, 2025

Catch up on your members' content, check out the community buzz, and browse through job opportunities

Author

Vahe Arabian
May 27, 2025

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

Join our upcoming webinar!

Are you struggling to balance audience engagement, content monetization, and tech simplicity? You’re not alone. Many publishers face the Goldilocks Tech Trap —tools that are either too clunky or too expensive, leaving growth stalled .

Join us for "Managing Millions: Better Audience Engagement Without the Tech Headaches" , where we’ll show you how to escape this trap and build scalable, profitable systems.

💡 What You’ll Learn:

✅ Turning clicks, scrolls, and headlines into actionable insights for stronger audience relationships.

✅ Streamlining over-complex data workflows to drive growth and ROI.

✅ Quick wins to turn loyal browsers into superfans.

✅ Striking the perfect balance between effective tools and agile systems .

Hosted by Denis Haman , CEO of Glide Publishing Platform Denis champions a “lean publisher mentality,” empowering media organizations with scalable, user-friendly CMS solutions.

📅 Date: June 11, 2025

🌐 Online Event

Don’t miss this chance to transform your audience engagement strategy and future-proof your publishing business.

TIP OF THE WEEK

AI-generated misinformation isn’t just a glitch — it’s a systemic risk.

Recently, The Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer published fake summer reading lists created by AI. Entirely fictional books, attributed to real authors, slipped through due to unchecked third-party syndication. This isn’t an isolated case. It reflects a growing trend: false narratives disguised as content, amplified by automation. Campaigns like TBWA\CJR’s PSAi are trying to equip audiences to spot AI-manipulated imagery and narratives. But what happens when publishers themselves fail to catch them?

Why this matters:

  • 67% of global respondents say they worry about fake news being weaponised (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2023)

  • Publishers associated with misinformation saw CPMs drop 25–40 %(Digiday, 2021)

  • Reader trust is fragile — and hard to rebuild once broken.

Practical steps for publishers:

  1. Multi-layered Fact-Checking: Don’t just trust the source, verify against primary data. Use checklists for high-risk content like health, finance, politics.

  2. Transparent Sourcing: Attribute all stats, quotes, and media. Use inline flags to add context to contested or evolving claims

  3. AI-Generated Content Auditing: Scan for synthetic images, ghostwritten copy, and deepfakes before publication. Log and label any AI-assisted contributions

  4. Own Your Errors: Launch “Report an Error” tools. Publicly log corrections to rebuild and maintain trust

The hard part? Speed often wins over accuracy. Misinformation outperforms verified content. Lean teams struggle to audit UGC and external contributions. But credibility isn’t optional. It’s foundational.

SODP POSTS

Nonprofit News Media Leaders are Struggling to Stop Leaning on the Foundations That Say They Should Branch Out More

You’ve probably heard the adage about not putting all your eggs in one basket.

It’s an especially meaningful one for newspapers. For decades, they relied heavily on advertising revenue. That arrangement stopped working about 20 years ago, as audiences moved online and advertisers followed. News media outlets moved online as well, but they found themselves in a losing battle for advertising dollars against new digital competitors such as Craigslist, Facebook and Google. One-third of U.S. newspapers have closed in the past two decades, most of them local.

As their income from ads and subscriptions has dwindled, some news organizations that used to rely mainly on ad revenue, such as The Salt Lake Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer, have become nonprofits – opening the door to other sources of revenue. And interest in launching news organizations as nonprofits has been growing. Meanwhile, some for-profit media outlets have begun to obtain some philanthropic support and ask for donations from readers and subscribers.

I’m a journalism studies researcher and a former journalist myself. To better understand how news leaders were thinking about their future in this ever-evolving landscape, I researched the fundraising approaches of local nonprofit news outlets across the U.S.

JOB BOARD

➡️ The Financial Times is seeking an experienced Editorial Growth and Engagement Journalist to join their New York newsroom who will plan and execute their social media coverage of news events around the world and will reach out to editors and reporters to give SEO recommendations. (NY). SEE MORE

➡️ Patch is seeking an editor to cover breaking news and trending topics in Rhode Island and Massachusetts who will cover breaking and statewide news across Rhode Island, reporting on urgent events as they happen. . (United States). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️Google officially stepped up the AI-commerce arms race last week with Shop AI: a great leap forward featuring intelligent search, agentic checkout, and virtual try-on tools. It’s sleek, fast, and marks a definitive shift away from the traditional shopping journey. This isn’t merely an enhancement to how we search – it’s fundamentally redesigning how people discover and buy, all within a single, fluid experience. READ MORE 

➡️If you want the lowdown on Google’s I/O hoedown, look no further than… 2013. Or maybe 2014. 2016 works too. Honestly, take your pick because it barely matters. Most of the coverage I’ve seen this year reads like AI-generated summaries written by folks with more letters after their names than a prescription bottle. Bless their hearts. But remember—Google’s founders didn’t show up with alphabet soup credentials. They showed up to solve a problem. READ MORE 

➡️Google isn't just ramping up its advertising presence in AI Overviews , which were supposed to be paid links under the conversations. Its new policies demonstrate what the future of its ads will look like across all of its AI modules. These days, users are seeing how Google not only displays AI Overviews, with its generative responses, but also ads at the bottom or on the side of certain queries. And even Google's AI-powered summary module could fall under the sponsored links category, in a twist of ad relocation with this new Google. READ MORE 

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Ahmed Alassafi on LinkedIn:

This content writing team took me from 3k to 11k followers in under 3 months – it was me and 6 AI agents.

The brutal reality of creating content? Most great ideas die in the “I should post this” graveyard.

Not because they’re bad ideas…

But because fleshing out one idea, then writing a LinkedIn post, let alone X threads, newsletters, shorts, reels, and TikToks is a 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘷𝘦 time sink.

I faced this exact problem – I have a day job, limited hours, but always wanted to share more of what I was building consistently.

That’s why I built a complete AI Workforce in Relevance AI that does the heavy lifting.

I type in one raw idea and then my Olympian team takes care of the rest:

→ 𝘚𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 questions my raw idea until it's crystal clear

→ 𝘊𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘰 turns it into viral-ready content (with fresh research if needed)

→ 𝘖𝘷𝘪𝘥 spins it into platform-perfect LinkedIn posts, X threads, and newsletters.

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP