Bo Sacks

I have been writing about artificial intelligence and experimenting with it for nearly four years. I use it every day. I have called it my intern, my research assistant, my copy editor, and occasionally a pain in the ass.

BoSacks Speaks Out: When Frequency Becomes Harassment

Professionally, I spend most of my days online. It is my job to track the present condition of publishing and, when possible, anticipate where the industry is heading. Lately, I have run into a contradiction that I do not know how to resolve.

There is cost-cutting. There is restructuring. And then there is what I call corporate savaging: dismembering a necessary institution for short-term financial benefit without sufficient regard for what the destruction does to the communities it serves.

Every once in a while, the old publishing dinosaur in me rears its head, looks around and says, “What the hell?”

BoSacks Speaks Out: A Manifesto for an Industry That Must Wake Up

Carol and I are moving next week to a smaller house, still here in Charlottesville. That means confronting and emptying an extremely large attic containing nearly 30 years of accumulated life, work, memories, boxes, papers, and assorted things we once believed we absolutely had to save.

The magazine business still has strengths worth celebrating and a future worth building. But optimism means little if it requires us to look away from unwelcome facts.

Based on reporting by The New York Times

BoSacks Speaks Out: What Would Bob Hoffman Say?

I read an article titled “End of a manga era as Weekly Shonen Jump’s circulation drops under one million,” by Casey Baseel, and I have to tell you, the story blew my mind.

BoSacks Speaks Out: When the Newsstand Left the Station

This article hits the nail squarely on the head.

BoSacks Speaks Out: AI, Publishing, and the Last One Percent

I received a note from one of my oldest readers, a man who still works in the industry and has been paying attention for a very long time. I will paraphrase him here: “Oh no, three articles about AI.”

I recently read an intriguing article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Noëlle de Leeuw titled, Something Novel: For Teens, a Print Renaissance Might Be Afoot.

Today, I read an article titled "Despite the Attacks, Newsroom Operations Have Never Stopped" about the wartime operations of Ukraine's public broadcaster. I finished reading it both humbled and stunned.

For years I have been warning that one of the greatest threats from the digital economy was not technology itself. It was surveillance.

I have a confession to make. Reading about the decline of Glamour made me feel old.

The other day I was digging through old lecture notes looking for one forgotten slide/quote. I never found it. What I found instead was far more interesting: proof that some of us in publishing have been arguing about the same future for more than twenty years.