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⚡Welcome to "The Upgrade," your weekly guide to understanding and unpacking the AI revolution in media and storytelling. Made for professional storytellers across the media landscape, this podcast is a must-listen for journalists, marketers, communications & PR pros, creators, and creatives. Each week, host Peter Bittner engages in conversations with experts, founders, journalists, and technologists to understand the trends and impacts of AI on media. Interested in understanding the impacts ...
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Ep. 25 – The Professor and the Philosopher
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This week, host Peter Bittner welcomes back artist, innovator and friend of The Upgrade Kris Krug. Over the last year, Peter and Kris have run courses together that help mediamakers, creatives and working professionals to incorporate AI into their daily lives and make their workflows more efficient. In this episode, the two discuss everything from …
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Ep. 24 – Is the Google Antitrust Ruling the End of Big Tech?
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Ricky Sutton began his journalism career as a war correspondent in the Balkans before taking on roles as a news editor and founder of Oovvuu, a company that formerly helped publishers and broadcasters to better reach audiences with the help of AI. He currently reports on the intersection of Big Tech and Big Media in his popular Substack Future Medi…
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Ep. 23 – Navigating the AI Revolution in Journalism
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Nick Petrie has spent his career in journalism working to help news organizations like The Times and Sunday Times and Reuters figure out the relationship between newsrooms and product development as well as building reader-focused subscription businesses. In this week’s episode of The Upgrade, host Peter Bittner talked with Nick about how generativ…
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Ep. 22 – Human in the Loop: A Conversation with Noah Kravitz
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Noah Kravitz started out as a stringer for a local newspaper in high school before moving out to the Bay Area to pursue a career covering tech. After years of writing product reviews he fell into a dream job hosting Nvidia’s AI podcast – which to date has received more than 5 million listens. On this week’s episode of The Upgrade, host Peter Bittne…
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Tamara McCleary started her career as a trauma nurse in the 1980s rescuing patients in helicopters and performing end of life care through hospice – an experience that gave her a keen interest in existential topics around life and death. In her work, Tamara strives to constantly upskill and update herself. That openness to change has led to many ca…
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Jagger Waters is a storyteller, writer and producer with a background in theater and comedy who spent her childhood behind the scenes at various local broadcast news stations, tagging along with parents who worked in newsrooms all around the United States. As a kid, she witnessed the corporate buyout of small-market television stations firsthand an…
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Eldad Sotnick-Yogev was working in fine dining back in the late ‘90s when some friends told him about a new, and at the time little-known, search engine called Google. He started playing around with Google search and was immediately hooked – so much that he embarked on a major career pivot to focusing on SEO and content strategy, and everything tha…
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Ep. 18 – Unleashing AI in Video with Stacie Chan
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Stacie Chan has worked as a television and voiceover actor, reporter in California, Google Product Partnerships Manager, and as the recently exited co-founder of the successful text-to-video startup Vidiofy.ai. But above all, Stacie considers herself a storyteller. That’s the mindset she brings to her new role as VP of Business & Growth at Haiper, …
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Ep. 17 – Is My Boss Using AI to Spy on Me?
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Hilke Schellmann never saw herself as a tech reporter. As a journalism professor at NYU who has covered subjects like sexual violence in Pakistan, Hilke first got interested in AI during a chance encounter with a Lyft driver who told her he had recently had an online job interview with a robot. That moment set her off on a years-long investigation …
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Ep. 16 – Gucci in the Forest: A Psychedelic Journey with Generative AI
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Kevin Broome is a graphic designer and brand strategist in British Columbia who started playing around with AI image-generating technology as a way to process the experiences he had during a three-day ayahuasca journey. The images he started making felt deeply personal. But it was only after he started using a local historical forest manifesto as a…
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The unofficial slogan of the Center for Cooperative Media at Monclair State University is collaborate or die. The Center, which works to help small newsrooms both in New Jersey and around the world to succeed, believes in the power of sharing resources to help local news outlets survive during these challenging times. It was that sort of spirit tha…
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Ep. 14 – How To Use AI in Your Media Company
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David Arkin has more than two decades of experience in audience and content which he now uses as a consultant helping publications better hone their strategies for SEO, content and social media. Among his diverse skill set, David has immersed himself in the development of AI technology with an eye toward how it can help publications to both become …
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Wes Shields started his new venture, Synthminds, almost by accident. A rather obsessive interest with exploring AI inspired him to offer his knowledge as an AI consultant on Upwork. To his surprise, the company eventually promoted him on their platform as one of the world’s “top AI experts” – that’s Upwork’s words, not his. Shields went on to found…
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Ep. 12 – Will AI Change How We Teach Media Literacy to Our Kids?
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When Erin McNeill became a mother she started developing strategies for how to best educate her kids about media literacy. As a reporter who used to cover Congress, Erin eventually realized she could use her knowledge about the legislative process to improve media literacy for students all over the country. Her organization, Media Literacy Now, has…
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Ep. 11 – Aristotle Meets AI: A Conversation with Filmmaker Peter Frelik
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Peter Frelik’s path to becoming a storyteller began seeing a matinee of a James Bond film as a kid and eventually led him to becoming a feature film editor for Hollywood and a director of commercials. AI image generators will soon make it possible for most anyone to produce a blockbuster from their own living room. But instead of crowding the field…
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John Biggs imagines a time in the near future where a human editor will manage a team of robot journalists using AI to report the news. A programmer turned journalist, Biggs is now co-founder of The Media Copilot, a consulting and media group that examines how AI is changing journalism and the news. In this episode of The Upgrade, Biggs spoke with …
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Ep. 9 – How to Ethically Build an AI-Powered Video Creation Tool
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During the pandemic Jeremy Toeman tried – and, as he puts it, failed dismally – at editing a video preview of his podcast. That experience gave him the idea to create an AI-powered tool to help novices put together a video instantly. The Upgrade’s host Peter Bittner talked with Jeremy about his latest venture Aug X Labs and how to ethically build a…
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Ep. 8 – The Business of Content: Journalist and Podcaster Simon Owens
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Simon Owens started his career as a newspaper reporter, but today he covers the media himself through this popular Substack and as the host of his podcast The Business of Content. Simon has successfully built an audience for his independent work by honing in on a concept known as parasocial relationships – the personal connection between a creator …
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Ep. 7 – The Reasons AI Could Cause a Startup to Fail
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Salvador Klein came from humble beginnings in a single-parent household in Canada surviving off welfare to become a successful post-exit founder, angel investor and an advisor to the CEOs of early-stage ventures all over the world. His Substack, Three Strikes Theory, examines real world case studies of companies large and small, and the three strik…
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Ep. 6 – How a Futurist Views the Age of AI
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Silicon Humanism founder, Sylvia Gallusser, worked for television and radio in France and in strategy consulting in California before making a career transition to become a professional futurist. The job title of a futurist might not have been on the shortlist of many children’s dream jobs growing up, but the discipline has become essential as comp…
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Ep. 5 – The Ways AI Can Solve the Communication Breakdown Between Publishers and Advertisers
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Since the internet took off, the relationship between publishers and advertisers has been fraught. Co-founders Christopher Brennan and Reagan Nunnally of Overtone are using AI tools to analyze articles and help both sides maximize their success online. The two previously worked on all sides of the publishing industry, with Christopher working as a …
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Ep. 4 – Rollin’ with Rolli: Nick Toso and Catalina Villegas on How AI Can Improve Equity in Media
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Nick Toso and Catalina Villegas are journalists who previously worked at CNN Español and understand the pressures that the daily grind puts on reporters. Connecting with reliable sources is one of the most time-consuming tasks a journalist faces, but quick deadlines often prohibit them from having enough time to find diverse voices. Villegas and To…
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Ep. 3 – From Taylor Swift to Willy Wonka: The Challenges and Opportunities Created by AI
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Tony Elkins is a journalist and citizen of the Comanche Nation who worries he’s becoming the doom and gloom person among those focusing on how AI will affect the journalism industry. As a faculty member at the Poynter Institute, Elkins has closely followed the challenges and opportunities AI is creating for both reporters and their readers. In this…
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Ep. 2 – Kris Krüg on How to Build Community and Wrap Your Head Around AI
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Kris Krüg’s career began in a Vancouver dorm room back in 1995 learning how to build basic web pages with a group of foreign exchange students. In the years since he’s worn many hats, working in corporate marketing, photojournalism and as an educator in the AI space. Host Peter Bittner talked with Kris about being a boundary-pushing creative explor…
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Ep. 1 – Legitimate Cofounders Caoimhe and Gerard Donnelly on the Future of Journalism and AI
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For The Upgrade’s inaugural episode, Peter talked with Caoimhe and Gerard Donnelly, the founders of Legitimate. Their new platform uses AI tools to help journalists save time, easily connect with reliable sources, produce groundbreaking reporting and fight misinformation. It’s a surprisingly optimistic conversation about the future of journalism in…
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