Media Library (60)

SIIA Joins Letter to the Administration on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF)

by Policy

The U.S. business and agriculture community welcomed the administration’s launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) talks to advance U.S. commercial interests in a critical region. We are eager to support stronger U.S. engagement in the Indo-Pacific region and to work in partnership with the administration and our regional allies to promote fair and inclusive trade, supply chain resilience, and the clean economy transition. However, we are growing increasingly concerned that the content and direction of the administration’s proposals for the talks risk not only failing to deliver meaningful strategic and commercial outcomes but also endangering U.S. trade and economic interests in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

Amidst the intricacies of this situation, agricultural recruitment agencies Australia stand out as key players in ensuring the prosperity of the region’s agricultural sector amidst shifting trade dynamics. Acting as bridges, these agencies connect skilled agricultural professionals with opportunities that align with broader aims such as fair trade and sustainability. Through their role in facilitating talent placement within the agricultural domain, these agencies contribute to the establishment of resilient supply chains and the stimulation of economic growth across the Indo-Pacific region. As conversations around the IPEF talks progress, the significance of agricultural recruitment agencies in Australia only amplifies, underscoring their vital role in bolstering the region’s agricultural landscape and promoting shared commercial interests.

The U.S. business and agriculture community regrets the administration’s decision not to engage in negotiations to remove tariffs and other market access barriers facing U.S. manufacturing, services, financial services, and agricultural exports. However, it is unclear why some traditional U.S. trade priorities that could deliver meaningful benefits for American exporters are being sidelined in the IPEF talks. For example, the United States has long pursued trade rules that seek to address standards-related and other technical barriers to trade, measures that discourage trade in remanufactured goods, inadequate intellectual property protections, and sector-specific regulatory barriers that impede exports of autos, chemicals, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and ICT products; the same is true for sanitary and phytosanitary standards and their importance to U.S. agricultural exports. Obtaining IPEF commitments in these areas would help facilitate trade in sectors where the competitiveness of U.S. companies is stymied by the proliferation of non-tariff barriers overseas. These barriers also undermine supply chain resiliency, potentially sapping the benefit of future IPEF commitments. The administration’s interactions to date with the stakeholder community offer no insight into how or why these non-market access issues of high importance to trade have been left out of the IPEF talks.

Further, we are deeply concerned about statements from U.S. officials and reports from the third IPEF round that suggest the administration is wavering in its promotion of high standard rules for digital trade. Data is the lifeblood of today’s global economy, underpinning and enabling businesses of all sizes and in all sectors, including in manufacturing, which is increasingly data-driven. Rules in recent U.S. trade agreements seek to ensure that data can flow freely across borders, businesses and entrepreneurs are not compelled to relinquish proprietary data, and the digital output of creative industries is not disadvantaged by the mere fact that it is owned by Americans or produced in the United States. Nothing in the rules concluded by the United States and its democratic allies—including in the USMCA, which secured large, bipartisan congressional majorities—inhibits the ability of governments to regulate in the interest of privacy, protection against bias, pursuit of fair market competition, or other public policy objectives. These rules are integral to U.S. political and economic values.

The United States should use the IPEF talks to build on the outcomes achieved in past negotiations and address evolving challenges to U.S. trade. An IPEF that instead derogates from these outcomes and abandons the core principle of nondiscrimination risks doing material harm to U.S. economic interests by emboldening restrictive foreign trade and data practices, undermining the efforts of like-minded allies to promote high standard global norms, and ceding U.S. leadership on rulemaking for the digital economy.

Read Full Letter Here
Media Library (57)

SIIA Joins Industry Letter Raising Concerns About the EUCS

by Policy

We write to raise concerns ahead of the upcoming meeting of the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC) taking place in Sweden at the end of this month, regarding new and alarming revisions to the European Commission’s proposed European Cybersecurity Certification Scheme for Cloud Services (EUCS). We urge the United States to use upcoming meetings to engage with the European Commission and Member States to secure a durable solution that will enable American and European companies to compete on a level playing field, underpinned by transatlantic trust and safety, by removing nationality-based ownership restrictions of this draft measure.

While we support the overall goal of the EUCS to unify and harmonize the best security practices while reducing market barriers for businesses, we continue to be concerned about lack of transparency and public consultation, and the missing market impact assessment. For example, EU financial institutions and associations have voiced concerns that the so-called “sovereignty requirements” in EUCS would limit technology choice and be detrimental to the resilience and cybersecurity of digital and cloud solutions. Furthermore, the sovereignty requirements in EUCS appear contradictory to the recently adopted Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).

If not addressed before finalized, a discriminatory EUCS also threatens to inhibit robust transatlantic cooperation and collaboration in strategic emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, and biotechnology, including at the NATO level among allies.

Read Full Letter Here
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‘Think Ambitious Experiments’; Valuing Failure and Coaxing the Best Ideas Out of Us

by Media

It’s interesting how we create our best work. I recall as a young Washington Post sports reporter being told by my editor that a tennis article wasn’t good enough and angrily writing something great after. But that can’t work too often. From talking to a lot of industry folks, one thing becomes clear: The importance of giving people the space to try, fail and try again.

A musical version of New York, New York—the 1977 film—opened on Broadway recently. Its ultra-accomplished 96 year-old composer, John Kander has been talking about what inspired him and his late songwriting partner Fred Ebb to write the film’s titular song. (They also wrote Cabaret and Chicago, among other things.)

“We wrote 5, 6 songs for [the film] and among them was New York, New York, and we played them for [Martin] Scorsese and Liza [Minnelli]—and [Robert] DeNiro was over on a couch someplace. We didn’t actually see him,” Kander said in a video recently. “We played our songs, and Marty was very complimentary, and we were getting ready to leave and suddenly we saw an arm raise up. There was a very animated conversation, and Scorsese came back and in a very embarrassed way said, ‘Would you mind going back and taking another crack at [New York, New York]?’

“And Fred and I [thought,] of course not! We took a cab back to our office, and in 45 minutes wrote the New York, New York that you know. It has a lot of anger in it because we were really pissed off. [He smiled.] ‘Some actor is going to tell us how to write a song!’”

It’s hard to say that Kander and Ebb momentarily failed. But Kander does admit that DeNiro’s words made them write a better song.

Here are some thoughts on the importance of allowing for failure and how to coax the best ideas:

Normalize talking about failures. “Working with metrics is all about trial and error, adjustment and retrial,” Elizabeth Gamperl wrote in her Reuters Institute report. “Every failure is a step closer to success.” Said one editor: “We have as many open conversations about when things haven’t worked as possible without everyone getting really upset. That is not easy because people work incredibly hard in the newsroom. What lessons can be learned?”

Make failure safe.“You have to have the ability to put yourself out there and be willing to fail,” Heather Farley, now the CEO of Access Intelligence, once told us. “Fail fast and fail forward is my favorite motto.” What was one of the first things you did when you became CEO of Match? Sam Yagan was asked. “When I took over Match, I realized that they use data, but the expectation—which was always data-driven—was that tests would all succeed. It wasn’t built in a culture of failure. Much like online betting sites not on Gamstop, where risks and uncertainty are inherent, I understood that embracing the possibility of failure was crucial. I compare never failing with not having ambition. [So the question became,] how do we let ourselves test out our intuition? The intuition has to inform what data you get.”

Learn lessons in success and failure. “If something [messes] up, you can look at your stats and figure out what went wrong,” said Kate Lucey, a former digital editor for Cosmopolitan UK. “Try new ideas—if they work, how can you expand them? If they fail, why did they fail and what have you learnt about your audience that you can apply to future work? It’s constant learning, constant adapting—and a constant headache… but it’s FUN.”

“Create a culture to build trust and collaboration, and breaking down silos…” Tim Hartman, CEO of GovExec said at one of our conferences. “Think ambitious experiments and trust each other. If you look around and don’t see that, you have a problem.”

Don’t let the quiet ones stay quiet. “Have a think tank where you can bring people to brainstorm,” Elizabeth Petersen of Simplify Compliance told us once. “Every person has ideas but you need to coax them out. I like to brainstorm on the fly. I have introverts [on staff], and they need to be encouraged. To have a structured agenda is a great way to get people talking.”

Set benchmarks. “One of the biggest barriers to innovation is fear of failure,” Petersen added. “The information industry is changing so rapidly and there are so many unknowns. Even the most thoroughly researched product may not gain market traction. The key to developing a humming new product development engine is to be comfortable with risk and to set measurable (and transparent) benchmarks for product success.”

Allow for turbulence. “Embracing failure is easier said than done,” Anita Zielina, former director of news innovation and leadership at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, told us at BIMS a few years ago. “We like to win and are not so excited about failure. But the culture of failure empowers your team to experiment. If you don’t, you’re not going to have creativity in the room. Experimentation includes failure, and organizations need to live with that. There is no digital product development that doesn’t have unexpected turbulences. But it also allows for agility.”

 

AI Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning News Headlines 3d Illustration

‘Probe It, Test It, Try to Stretch the Limits’; an AI Practitioner Shares Secret Sauce

by Media

There was a terrific article written a couple weeks ago by Sophie Culpepper on NiemanLab headlined, “Can AI Help Local Newsrooms Streamline Their Newsletters? ARLnow Tests the Waters.” She introduced me and many others to two journalists doing incredible stuff with AI in getting out their publications. (I’ve been in touch with both, and they will join us on a future webinar/Editorial Council meeting.)

Scott Brodbeck is the founder of Virginia-based media company Local News Now. For his ARLnow site (covering Arlington, Va.), he wanted to develop a morning email newsletter with more voice than his afternoon one. So, Culpepper wrote, “he began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and AI summaries of human-written stories. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention.” Now he’s working on a two-minute, AI-generated audio news summary and tells me he’ll have more for us in a couple months.

Joe Amditis is assistant director for products and events at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey. He “recently released a free handbook detailing applications and considerations for AI use by local news publishers.” I was fortunate to get to talk to Amditis last Friday about what he’s doing. Interestingly, Zapier and Airtable came up often in his conversation as well. In fact at one point, he stopped and said, “Okay, well you need to drop everything you’re doing after this call and just learn Zapier.”

In addition to featuring Brodbeck and Amditis at a later date, our AM&P Network will be exploring AI in a Main Stage session at our upcoming AMPLIFY 2023 Content & Marketing Summit, June 27-28 here in Washington, D.C. The session, Practical Things You Can Do Right Now With AI (and How to Use It Ethically) will take place on the 28th. It will give you an excellent foundation for your AI learning curve. Check out the full agenda here and registration information here. It’s an event not to be missed!

Here’s some of the enlightening conversation I had with Amditis:

RL: How have you been using AI mostly?
Joe Amditis: So we have like a million newsletters, and it drives me crazy. But part of the reason why [AI] is so useful is because we have so many, and it takes a lot of time to compile them. And personally, I found that these tools are most effective and most useful, not when you’re just going into them blank and asking it to make something for you from scratch. It’s awful. Honestly, it’s high school writing level, at best usually, unless you get really specific with it. But what it can do, what it’s really good at is taking already existing content, and then synthesizing it or repackaging it or repurposing it into a different format—or extracting takeaways and doing summaries and things. So acting on an existing set of information, as opposed to asking it to sort of generate from scratch is incredibly useful.

Where’s the majority of your usage?
I’ve tested this thousands of times, quite literally, at this point. The majority of our usage is—I would imagine we’re very similar to [your audience]—administrative tasks or copywriting and copy editing and organizing text on your screen, and to summarize and generate takeaways. We can make things more concise, repackage them for different platforms or mediums whether for a newsletter, or a LinkedIn post or something like that. We’ll take our existing stuff that we’ve written and produced, and then repackage that.

Can you explain further how you do this?
When I have a new article that we’ve written, let’s say I want to do a series of actions. I might want to make this easier and more concise, like a summary for our newsletter or for a partner newsletter that goes out. Let’s say for our collaborative journalism newsletter we have a news item and a headline and summary of the main points and then we have a link. What I’ve done is gone to Zapier and to Airtable, and I’ve created a base for automation, specifically for that. And I’ve got this setup here [to] use the Airtable Web Clipper—it’s a little browser extension that allows you to pull anything from the Internet into an Airtable base. Now I have the whole text of the article and then I can select the tone or the vibe of the text that I want Chat to give to me. I want to use maybe “educational, thoughtful and optimistic” let’s just say. I want to select a purpose. We have our different newsletters or promotional channels so I’ll say, general promotional channel; that’ll end up in the promo and will channel in Slack ultimately. And then here it automatically pulls in the URL to that post. So I hit Add Record.

Okay, I think I’m following.
Zapier sees that record in Airtable and then it sends that information to ChatGPT through their integration with the prompt. So I’d say summarize the following text; the summary will promote the event article and information contained in the text. And I wanted to create a list of three possible headlines. And again, the tone of the headline should be thoughtful, educational, optimistic. And it can draw on that as additional context for the audience that it’s going to be sent to. Then I do the same thing for a series of tweets, five possible social media posts. Again, here your job is to create social media promo copy,

And the last thing is why people should care?
They care about community engagement, trust in journalism, marginalized voices. So this is now like cannon fodder for our newsletter writer and compiler to go through, and not only have some starting material to get going, so they don’t just start with like a blank MailChimp campaign. It’ll be heavily edited. In fact, most of the language that the bot spits out, probably won’t make it in its original form. Although sometimes it’s just like, “this is actually a good summary.” And then our newsletter writer can take that into MailChimp. And that why should people care about part gives us a sense of the angle or the approach that we might take to sharing and promoting this, because a lot of times, I’ve found personally and with our colleagues that your brain just locks up when you go to tweet or share something out. And you’re like, “you should care about it, because it’s new, and I made it, and I’m proud of it, right?” And instead, this gives us an opportunity for a little bit of help contextualizing.

Are those apps all separate or part of a bigger thing?
They’re all separate apps; they existed before opening AI and everything. I’ve been using Airtable for about six, seven years now. You don’t need Airtable for this. In fact, you can use Google Sheets.

How did getting up to speed on all this work for you and your department?
I still can’t get my boss and my co-workers other than maybe one (on board)—and we only have four co-workers who are in the office at any given point. Only Cassandra, our newsletter writer, has really even started to lean into this a little bit, and it’s because after a while, she’s like, “Wow, it’s taking me three days to do this bi-weekly newsletter.” And [I say,] “Wouldn’t it be great if you had a tool that could cut off some of that time? Then I build the automation. And now it becomes almost irresistible because she can’t not look at the summaries; they’re in the Slack channel. It’s a very low-hanging fruit for her.

It’s not easy, I imagine, after we’ve all been doing this a certain way.
There’s this feeling with a lot of people when it comes to using their computer, especially if they’re not already confident, or they’re very nervous about computers, that they feel like if they press the wrong button, or they click on the wrong thing, it’s going to delete their entire operating system… And there’s this tension that people are still a little hesitant about. That’s going back to just computers in general, let alone this new, scary slash exciting AI stuff that they feel that same pressure to not break everything. And the reality is, all you have to do is talk to it, back and forth and see what it can do. Probe it, test it, try to fool it, try to stretch the limits of what it’s capable of doing. And you’ll start to see the outlines of what the actual uses of the tools are—if you go through that experimentation process.

More can be found on The Center for Cooperative Media here. Amditis said to let them know if his handbook and/or advice are useful for you. “You could also tell funders to give us money, but that’s a whole other thing.”

Media Library (80)

Anton Van Seventer Joins SIIA as Counsel for Privacy and Data Policy

by PolicyPress Release

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) today announces the appointment of Anton Van Seventer as Counsel for Privacy and Data Policy.  He will support and advocate on behalf of SIIA’s technology members on key issues and initiatives including privacy.

Van Seventer has extensive experience with technology privacy issues and joins SIIA from DLA Piper LLP where he was an Associate and Counsel to the State Privacy & Security Coalition. He has worked on privacy laws in many states including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Utah, and Virginia. Prior to joining DLA Piper, he clerked for the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary where he specialized in tech policy, including Section 230, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and principles for AI regulation.

“Anton’s experience working for the Senate and representing clients on state and federal privacy issues elevates our policy team’s capabilities,” said Paul Lekas, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy and Government Affairs.  “Our members are dealing with an array of critical issues across the data policy landscape, including state and federal privacy legislation, heightened interest in regulating AI, uncertainty in cross-border data flows, and an active Federal Trade Commission. Anton will help drive SIIA’s policy and advocacy on these important matters.”

Van Seventer received a BA in Political Science and History from the University of Michigan and his JD from the Georgetown University Law Center.