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

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.

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