Tarbell Center for AI Journalism

They offer fellowships to support journalism that helps society navigate the emergence of increasingly advanced AI, and a few other journalism ventures. They have sponsored at least one person who went on to do good work in the area. They also sponsor article placement, which seems reasonably priced in the grand scheme of things, I think?

I am not sure this is a place we need to do more investment, or if people trying to do this even need fellowships. Hard to say. There’s certainly a lot more tech reporting and more every day, if I’m ever short of material I have no trouble finding more.

It is still a small amount of money per person that can meaningfully help people get on their feet and do something useful. We do in general need better journalism. They seem to be in a solid place but also I’d be fine with giving a bunch more funding to play with, they seem pretty unique.

Donate here, or reach out to them via webform.

I'd like to see a lot more coverage of AI in journalism and Tarbell seems like the people who've done the best/most of this job so far.

Independently, a couple people have said they are fans of Tarbell's reporters which I think is a good sign and a sign that they should get continued funding. Marius' grant below is a great sign in my opinion.

On the negative side, I somewhat worry that Tarbell wants to grow extremely quickly and they haven't been that cost effective in doing so though I haven't done a lot of calculations to support this.

I'm also not a fan of trying very hard for non-OP dollars and not a fan of matching campaigns. I think these are both a sort of tragedy of the commons and the EA community should try not to succumb to these wishes.

Overall, I'm a fan and so making a donation. I've spoken to Cillian for ~1.5 hours

I'm recommending a $10k donation as a regrantor.

Multiple journalists in the Tarbell program have previously reached out to me for news articles and, while they are often less experienced, they often ask better questions and write better articles than their senior colleagues.

With better, I specifically don't mean "they represent my opinion", but I mean 1. They have read the paper, and the questions are well-prepared. 2. The resulting texts are typically more accurate and have much fewer factual errors than the texts from my average journalist experience. 3. The questions are often critical and really trying to understand the limitations of the work rather than softball.

In general, all Tarbell journalists I have worked with so far seemed to have high integrity with a strong desire to write an accurate and interesting article for their readership rather than produce an attention-grabbing headline.