Friday Reading About Eco Fashion and Toxin-Free Living

Recycled polyester saved this American factory. Environmentalists hate it.

Last year, I gave up on EcoCult.com and moved over to here, Substack. As I explained at the time, I saw the AI-generated writing on the wall.

Google doesn’t want you to read my stuff. Instead, it wants to steal my thoughts and research and mash them up into an inaccurate but profitable summary on its page, that then sends you to buy stuff from its advertisers.

Since then, it’s gotten worse. This is the main crux from The Atlantic article this week:

Not all publishers are at equal risk: Those that primarily rely on general-interest readers who come in from search engines and social media may be in worse shape than specialized publishers with dedicated subscribers. Yet no one is totally safe. Released in May 2024, AI Overviews joins ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, and other AI-powered products that, combined, have replaced search for more than 25 percent of Americans, according to one study. Companies train chatbots on huge amounts of stolen books and articles, as my previous reporting has shown, and scrape news articles to generate responses with up-to-date information. Large language models also train on copious materials in the public domain—but much of what is most useful to these models, particularly as users seek real-time information from chatbots, is news that exists behind a paywall. Publishers are creating the value, but AI companies are intercepting their audiences, subscription fees, and ad revenue.

In short, the kind of media companies that used to publish my investigative work are going under.

Rapidly-changing, life-altering stories take professional journalists time and support to create. It also exposes them to lawsuits from powerful people and corporations. It’s best if they do that work as part of a media outlet with lawyers and fact checkers and the ability to pay a salary even if the big story isn’t finished until six months from now.

It’s really hard to do all that as a freelancer. I don’t get paid until a few weeks after a story gets published. (I have that in common with garment factories — not getting paid until long after I do all the work.) And I couldn’t do it anymore. I would craft excellent pitches and editors wouldn’t even reply, because they’re doing the jobs of three people. I would write a great story and it would get killed because the editor couldn’t even look at it. I would write a great story and the editor would want to assign another, and then would get laid off.

Case in point, I turned in a story on the American factory that makes Repreve recycled polyester in November of 2023. It just got published this week, and only because I made the case that it’s about American manufacturing and tariffs and China.

It was top on the site, yay! But it was too late to save my freelance career. I stopped pitching any publication at all late last year. I simply couldn’t afford to.

I’m about to pay $2,000 for media liability insurance in case one of the companies I write about decides to come after me. That is 7% of my expected annual income from this newsletter. And yes, if you do the math, I’m not making a livable income from this newsletter.

So, I got a job running communications for a biodiversity nonprofit in February. It comes with healthcare and meaning and awesome coworkers. I’m lucky I found it. But I’m also sad, because the career I love so much is dying.

In a couple of weeks, I have an investigation coming out that previously would have gone in a large publication, but it’s going to be here.

I’m grateful to the members who pay for a subscription so I can continue to carve out time to write this newsletter every week, two to three times per week. If you weren’t here, I would just let this whole thing go.

So thank you. For your kind words, for your vote of confidence.

Okay, here are the rest of the reading links I’ve collected for my members this week!