Richard Palmer

Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the devastating wildfires across France, Spain and the UK. We are deeply grateful to the firefighters, emergency services and volunteers working tirelessly in extraordinarily difficult conditions. These events are a stark reminder of the challenges posed by an increasingly extreme climate and the importance of protecting both people and nature. W

I’ve got some good friends who work at Reach. They described how good journalism was no longer valued. Everything became about clicks clicks clicks. They were forced to churn out more and more clickbait headlines - the positive aspects of journalism such as going places to meet people, doing interviews, breaking important scandals - were thrown out the window because they had to write so many stories per day. Churnalism factories. At the same time they have faced round after round after round of redundancies and the company started to replace them with AI. Meanwhile the bosses kept taking five or even six figure salaries while presiding over a culture of destroying their brands. Now that AI has started eating them: people no longer click when they can get the answer to their question even more easily, without having to face a barrage of pop up adverts and click throughs. Journalism is struggling to find ways forward in this new age of AI - but at the same time, good journalism has never been more important. If you value good journalism, please remember to pay for it.