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Using AI to Aggregate News for Healthy Reading, With Alex Fink

The age of clickbait is coming to an end. Otherweb's Alex Fink is determined to improve your news diet.

This week on The Media Copilot podcast I’m thrilled to talk to Alex Fink. Alex is the founder and CEO of Otherweb, a news aggregator that uses AI to give readers a healthier news diet than your average social media feed. Instead of optimizing for outrage or clickbait, Otherweb favors “kale over cake” — an analogy we come back to a few times in the conversation.

Alex has an interesting career. After working for a long time in computer vision, he decided the world had enough cameras and decided to focus instead on the decisions technology could help with rather than the tech itself. Otherweb isn’t his first rodeo — he’s been a founder twice before and a very astute observer of the media business. He’s full of great observations about the arguably corrupted incentives of ad-based media, which helps to guide Otherweb and the way it ranks and serves up content.

If you like this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app, really. Also, we’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, please like the video and subscribing to the channel.


Looking to understand how AI can help make you a more productive journalist, PR professional, marketer, or content creator? We highly recommend our thorough three-hour AI Bootstrapping for Marketers and Media class, happening April 16. Starting with foundational AI concepts, the class teaches the essentials of prompting, explores a suite of tools curated for creative work, and shows how to get started on custom solutions for your own workflows.

For those with busy schedules, we also offer a one-hour Beginning AI for Marketers, PR, and Journalists, happening April 15. It's a crash course meant to rapidly bring novices up to speed on using generative tools. Even if you think you know the basics of ChatGPT and other chatbots already, this class will improve your use of it with a focus on advanced prompting techniques, underutilized features, and a set of go-to tools for speeding up work.

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The Media Copilot
The Media Copilot
Weekly converatsions with journalists, media executives, and fascinating people on how AI is changing media, journalism, and the news.