Thomson Reuters announced the purchase of World Business Media (WBM), an insurance industry publisher.

WBM is based in London and is a provider of analytics and editorial coverage on the insurance and reinsurance industries, including The Insurer outlet, The Insurer TV and an events business. After the acquisition WBM will become part of the Reuters News division. Financial details were not disclosed.

“World Business Media is the latest in a string of acquisitions undertaken by Thomson Reuters as part of its plan to expand offerings for its professional clients. In August, the company closed its $650 million cash acquisition of Casetext, a California-based AI company that helps legal professionals conduct research, analysis and prepare documents using generative AI”, Reuters reports.

Artifact, a news aggregation platform launched by Instagram co-founders over a year ago, announced it would shut down.

Artifact launched as a news reading app that evolved to a curation and news discovery platform, as TechCrunch writes. The company leaned on AI tools to find the best stories, rewrite headlines to address clickbait, and summarise news.

However, it looks like Artifact hasn’t found momentum to quickly grow a substantial user base amidst high competition from platforms like X / Twitter, Threads and others.

As the company’s announcement notes, “we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way”, and thus “making the tough call [to shut down] earlier is better for everyone involved”.

On Monday Russia launched its pro-government version of Wikipedia, called Ruwiki. The website is the most high-profile attempt so far to build an online encyclopedia filtered through the lens of pro-government propaganda. “Russian President Vladimir Putin gave his approval to new alternative platforms to Wikipedia in May of 2022”, Reuters reports citing Russian media.

Wikipedia itself has remained one of the last propaganda-free corners of Internet in Russia throughout the crackdown following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago. The Russian government has been hesitant to block Wikipedia so far, but this might change in the future as the Kremlin moves to further isolate Russian internet from the outside world.

Source of the cover photo: Jason Zhang, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons 

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