Marina Hyde launches own media brand | Quartz website filled by AI-assisted reporter

👋 Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 12 October.

💃 The Guardian is currently investing heavily in more creator-style content. So it is a blow to the business that one of its biggest journalistic personalities is launching their own media brand backed by Goalhanger.

Marina Hyde already presents weekly podcast/video show The Rest Is Entertainment alongside Richard Osman for Goalhanger and announced the end of her long-running Guardian column two weeks ago. She is now launching her own media brand, Always On, which will include a Substack-style newsletter and a new video show.

I suspect The Guardian will not have been able to match Goalhanger’s generous revenue share - believed to be a 50/50 split - on the podcast/video element of Marina-world. And when it comes to Substack, creators keep at least 85% of revenue (after Substack’s 10% commission and the processing fees).

Goalhanger and Substack also offer a level of creative freedom creators are unlikely to enjoy at legacy publishers.

Hyde joins her former close friend Piers Morgan and former Today presenter Amol Rajan as UK journalism stars who have bet they can make more money as brands in their own right.

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😟 What has happened to Quartz?

It still appears to invest journalistic effort in its newsletters and podcasts. But its website, once much admired and copied, appears to have won whatever you get when you finish first in a race to the bottom.

Acting on a tip-off, Rob Waugh took a closer look at the output of Cris Tolomia, who alone is responsible for the vast majority of Quartz’s website output – around 50 articles per day.

Tolomia appears to be a digital marketing expert from the Philippines and is heavily leaning on AI to produce instant rewrites of other people’s original reporting.

They even appear to be using AI to produce entire features, one of which was referenced by MIT Media Lab.

We’ve asked Quartz what is going on but not had a response yet.

Rob used Made by Humans - AI Detection for Newsrooms to research this, a suite of investigative tools for journalists developed by Flip-Pay and Press Gazette that can be plugged directly into a publisher’s CMS.

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🚨We have disappointing news from Leicester where at least five journalists were arrested whilst covering a protest outside a drone factory.

In case any police officers read this newsletter, here’s a reminder of guidelines published in February that every police force in England and Wales has signed up to:

“Reporting or filming from the scene of an incident is part of the media’s role. They should not be prevented from doing so from a public place.”