American journalist Evan Gershkovich remains in Russian custody after having been detained last week on spying allegations while on a reporting trip in Yekaterinburg. He is held in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow.

Gershkovich, 31, covers Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union for The Wall Street Journal. He previously worked for The New York Times, The Moscow Times and Agence France Presse.

All the signs show that he was de-facto taken hostage by the Russian government, a grim development that marks the escalation of “hostage diplomacy” – and the first detention of an American journalist in Russia spying allegations since the Cold War.

The White House said that freeing Gershkovich is a priority for American president Biden, and various news organisations in the US and globally called for his release.

Business news company Bloomberg announced the launch of BloombergGPT, a large language model (LLM) trained on financial data to support reporting on the finance industry.

As the company said in an announcement, despite the recent advancements in generative AI, the complexity of financial news warrants a domain-specific model. Bloomberg says its product “outperforms similarly-sized open models on financial NLP tasks by significant margins — without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks” and will be used for answering business-related questions, generating headlines, and many other tasks.

As NiemanLabs’ Joshua Benton notes, this use case is interesting for publishers. Even though Bloomberg is in a unique position as one of biggest financial news publishers in the world, “there will be, in the longer term, openings for smaller publishers here, especially those with large digitized archives” to create a sort of “institutional memory in a box” trained on proprietary archives rather than publicly available web data, as is the case with the models used by ChatGPT and other products developed by tech giants.

Financial Times acquired a majority stake in Endpoints News, a medical news B2B publication that was launched in 2014 and has over 163,000 subscribers reporting on the biopharma industry.

“This acquisition marks a significant milestone in the FT’s expansion in the US, where Endpoints is based, and deepens the FT’s coverage of the dynamic biopharma sector”, the company noted in a press release.

The FT aims to “diversify its business in strategic areas”, including by acquisitions of stakes in companies like Dutch events and media firm The Next Web and investment intelligence company GIS Planning.

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

The Guardian: BBC journalists to strike during local elections over radio cuts
Reuters: BBC names head of review after Lineker social media row
Reporters Without Borders: Three Ukrainian TV news channels barred from digital video broadcasting for past year

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