Weekly Digest: Axios’s software business AI expansion, The Guardian’s apology for founders’ links to slavery

Axios HQ, Axios’s sister company that makes software for organisational communications, raised $20 million to fund its expansion with the use of generative AI tools, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The company was spun off from Axios when the latter was sold last year to Cox Enterprises. Axios HQ helps businesses communicate using the style pioneered by the outlet and branded as “Smart Brevity” – short bullet points, brief writing that gets to the point as briefly as possible. 

As The Wall Street Journal notes, the company’s software “already was powered by homegrown artificial intelligence based on years of findings from Axios’s editorial content”, but now it will leverage OpenAI’s ChatGPT to expand the business, helping clients write emails and external communications. “The $20 million cash infusion, which was led by… [two former Axios investors] values the software business at close to $100 million”, WSJ reports.

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The Guardian’s owner Scott Trust apologised for its founders’ links to transatlantic slavery in the early 19th century. 

The newspaper was founded in 1821 as Manchester Guardian by publisher and mechant John Edward Taylor. An investigation, which was commissioned by the outlet’s owner The Scott Trust in 2020 and published this week, concluded that “Taylor, and at least nine of his 11 backers, had links to slavery, principally through the textile industry”; one of the companies he partnered with “imported vast amounts of raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas”.

The company apologised to the communities affected by the slave trade and to the descendants of the enslaved people involved, as well as for “early editorial positions that served to support the cotton industry, and therefore the exploitation of enslaved people”. To compensate, the Scott Trust announced it would create a program of restorative justice worth over £10 million, to fund the development of descendant communities affected by slavery linked to The Guardian’s backers, as well as to invest in the newspaper’s reporting on Black communities.

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Oleksandr Tsakhniv, a former journalist at the Vchasno news agency covering the beleaguered Donbas region, was killed in combat while defending eastern Ukraine from Russia’s invasion.  He was 37 and originated from the mining town of Selidove in the eastern Donetsk region. Before the full-scale war, he covered corruption in the region and worked on anti-corruption investigations, Vchasno notes.

His killing is a reminder of the toll Russia’s war against Ukraine has taken on Ukrainian journalists, both those covering the war and those who’ve suffered as civilians or having left journalism to join the army. According to Ukrainian NGO Institute of Mass Information, “Oleksandr Tsakhniv is the 50th media worker to die in Ukraine as a result of Russia’s armed aggression… eight died while reporting, 42 died as combatants or were killed by Russian shelling, not in the line of their journalist duty.” 

Bonus — Two more stories you might want to check out:

• Committee to Protect Journalists: New Ukrainian army regulations limit reporters’ access to frontlines
• Bloomberg: North Korean Hackers Posed as NY Times, Voice of America Staff

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