B (2:11)

That's how I have to do it. I have to go in my head and go, wait, Magazine. Okay, It's a zine, Right? Okay, gotcha.

A (2:17)

We're not making a maga zine.

B (2:19)

Just to be clear. That's also a very good point of clarification. Yeah, it's kind of the opposite of the complete opposite of that. And we'll get into that. But we are making this. Jason, I guess before we talk about print media and how independent media is doing a lot more of it just concretely, sort of, what are our plans here? What are we making exactly?

A (2:44)

Yeah, I think we want to make this conversation relevant, not just like a product announcement. So I think that we are doing a print zine. It's going to be 16 pages. It's going to be this size if you're on YouTube. So it's like five by 10, like a sheet of paper folded in half. And it's going to be about our reporting on ICE's surveillance tactics. So it's a mix of our best reporting and a couple news stories, reworked versions of our older stories. We didn't like, wholesale reuse anything, but it is like, there's a few reasons that we're doing it. I think first and foremost, we've wanted to do print in some format for a while. I think just because it's cool, honestly, we, you know, we're able to do things just because it's cool and because we like it. But I think there's something very tangible and physical about the printed word. And I think that. I don't know about y', all, but I grew up being like, oh, I'd like to write in a magazine.

B (3:48)

I love to just read them. You know, when it's like I go away somewhere and now I'm going to really focus on reading. I don't want to be distracted by the Apple news app or Blue sky or whatever. I want to sit down, I want to read something cover to cover. And sometimes I do that and it feels good, you know?

A (4:04)

Yeah. It lets us play with design. It lets us play with, like, tangible things. And then I think critically, and what a lot of this post is about is sort of about the fact that we own this company. We talked about the fact that we own this company 1 million times. And part of that is we operate on the Internet and we distribute our stuff through these algorithms that are controlled by big tech. We distribute our stuff on, well, not so much on Twitter anymore, but on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Bluesky, and on these platforms, they are moderated by algorithms. Even Blue sky has like a recommendation algorithm. And so, so much of it is of whether someone sees something that we do is based on whether they are served it by the algorithm, whether it performs well in the algorithm. And you read it, and of course, you can share it with someone else in a group text and. And things like that, but, you know, you sort of have to click it and. And go. Go to that thing. Whereas with print media, I really like the fact that it's going directly to the people who buy it. You know, like, we will mail it directly to you. We're doing this as part of a benefit concert here in Los Angeles for cheerla, which is an immigrants rights organization. And we are going to be handing it out at the concert. So, you know, we could print out our blogs and hand it out there, or we could have a QR code and say, like, go to our website. But I think the fact that we're able to just like, hand this tangible thing to people is. Is cool. It's a different distribution method. I mean, it's a distribution method that's been around for thousands and thousands of years, but it's one that works. And I think it's one that's not moderated by algorithms. I think we wrote in the piece that, you know, you can read this zine if you get it, and then you can give it to a friend, or you can give it to the library, or you can throw it in the trash. You can light it on fire. Like, you can do all sorts of different things with it that you can't really do with a thing on a screen. And I think that in an age where so much of what we do is moderated by algorithms and increasingly where everything is so automated, so AI focused, we wanted to create something that was really tangible and really human, sort of as an experiment, but also because we thought it would be cool.

B (6:33)

Yeah, we'll get to some of the other experiments that you especially have done on motherboard and then what other outlets are doing around physical media. But before we get to that, just what has some of the process been in designing and building this? I should say it also. I mean, it does exist because we've designed it, but it isn't being printed yet. I think that's going to start tomorrow. So apart from that aspect of the process, which literally hasn't happened yet, what did it involve up until now?

A (7:04)

Yeah, so we'll make some, like, Instagram posts and YouTube videos and maybe like, a blog post about the actual physical production and distribution of this thing. But basically, the way it works, we're doing a reso print or a resograph print printer, which I talked about in a previous episode of this podcast. But basically it's a type of Japanese printer that's been around since the early 90s, I believe. And it's a type of printer that was designed for mass production. And basically it's a mechanism of screen printing on paper, more or less. And so you print one color at a time. You layer the colors, you have different opacities for the colors and you can create like these very cool effects because of that. And so basically, like we picked three colors that we were going to use. You know, I commissioned an artist to do the COVID Their name is very Alvarez. They're based here in Los Angeles and they, they've been doing a lot of art about ICE in general over the last few months. So I was drawn to their work and you know, I talked to them and it was a big process of like, well, which colors should be used for the zine? Like what we have a three color palette to play with. Like, what do you think works best here? And so there was like a lot of back and forth there. We also are working with our old friend Ernie Smith, who runs a newsletter called Tedium, that is, I believe their tagline is like searching for the long tail of the Internet. But he writes a lot about.

A (8:38)

Like forgotten Internet things, so check him out. But basically he used to be a newspaper designer in a previous life and a previous career many moons ago. And so he came out of retirement to help lay this out. So it was a lot of like we wrote the zine, like we wrote the articles on, in Google Docs and then we shared it with Ernie and then Ernie did like some, you know, we, I, I did some like phone calls with Ernie being like, well, this is the vibe for this page. This is the vibe for that page. And he did a few different designs, sent it back and forth and he.

B (9:14)

Did some, I think he's going to write about it himself and it'd be great to hear more later. But he did some like crazy stuff with Linux and VMs, which I don't know all the details, but I'm very, very curious to hear.

A (9:27)

Yeah, very notably he did it all in Linux. And yeah, like, which is cool because.

A (9:34)

A lot of this work is usually done in Adobe products which have AI ified everything. So he did it in Affinity, which is now owned by Canva, but I don't think has been super AI ified yet. And he did it on his Linux machine. And it's notable just because of the way that you have to do the file layouts and things for risograph printing is sort of notable and it was difficult to do on Linux, but I think he wanted to give himself a challenge and he succeeded at it.

A (10:07)

I would say the most stressful part of any of this is like there's two things. One, it's print deadlines. So we were invited to partake in this concert A couple, like, about a month ago now. And so in order to get copies in time for the concert, which is January 4th, you can learn more about it probably in the YouTube description.

A (10:32)

We had to, like, get this to the printer very quickly. So we had to do the whole thing, like, relatively quickly because, you know, gotta, gotta print it. And it takes time to do it and put it together and all that. And it's a very like, DIY studio that we're using. It's called Punch Kiss Press here in Los Angeles. And like, not only do you have to print the pages, but because of the way it works, you have to, like, let them dry because it's like wet ink that doesn't dry immediately. And then you. They're being assembled by hand, more or less. So it's very, like, labor intensive.

A (11:03)

And then also it's like, you can't have typos. I don't think that we have typos, but it's like, if you have a typo or, you know, say something a little bit like off on the Internet, you can go and you can fix it.

A (11:16)

You can't do that with print. And so you could, but it'd be.

B (11:19)

Very labor intensive and you'd have to get all the copies back there.

A (11:22)

Sorry, you have to request them be mailed back to you. I mean, I did used to work at a print magazine. Like, my first job was at Washington magazine in D.C. and every month they would have a corrections column, like, in the next issue of the magazine being like, here's things we missed in the last one. And I was a fact checker there. So if we missed something, it was very horrible to have a correction. Like, very embarrassing. But that's one of the things about the printed word. You all know this is not shedding any light, but there's a huge amount of stress associated with, like, is there a typo here? Is there extra spacing, like, stuff like that? And I don't know, we. We've, like, we caught things going up to the last second. I'll be going to the printer tomorrow. Like, when you're listening to this, to, like, watch the process and hopefully help out a little bit. But it is a very manual, very human process that we're doing. And it doesn't have to be this way. Like, we could have found a big company to print these for us and just sent them PDFs and, like, been done with it. But I think that for this first experiment, we wanted to try to have our hands on all aspects of it and just do it in this, like, cool, artistic fashion.

A (12:41)

And hopefully we'll do more at some point. No, no specific plans on it yet, but this one has gone well so far. Like, people seem excited about it.

B (12:51)

Yeah, that's where the fun is, doing the supply chain stuff for yourselves. And it's the same that you've done with the merch, basically, where we got these designs and you found, like a local printer to do those as well. That's definitely part of it. But there's this sort of. I don't want to exaggerate it or over emphasize it, but there has been some moves recently with independent media to go back to physical media. The Onion, you know, that was bought by Ben Collins and co recently from. From the previous owners, and then they've gone back to a physical newspaper. Do you see it in that sort of vein, Jason? Are there any more examples I'm forgetting? Onion is the main one, I think.

A (13:40)

Yeah. So one more thing. I also had to pick out the paper that it would be printed on, which was pretty wild because I, like, went to the printer and they had a bunch of different types of paper that we could have printed on. And she was like, what weight of paper do you want? And what type of, like, what company and all this. And so that was cool. Don't know a ton about paper. So I basically went with her recommendations. But, like, that's how granular these options were, which is pretty neat. But, yeah, you're absolutely right. There has been been, I think, in this moment of people getting fed up with social media and getting fed up with the Internet and staring at a screen all day. There has been a bit of a return to print media.

A (14:21)

I feel it myself. Like, I feel like I want to support human things made by human beings. And so there has been a handful of new magazines or magazines that have existed for a while that have, like, some newfound prominence and things like that. I think the biggest one is the Onion, because they were obviously bought last year, two years ago by Ben Collins and, you know, consortium of people. And Ben Collins used to be a disinformation reporter, I believe, at msnbc.

B (14:54)

And. Yeah, and before that I worked with him briefly. The daily basis.

A (14:57)

Yeah. And so he went to that. And, like, one of the first things that they did was, like, we're bringing back the newspaper, the. The Onion newspaper. And the. The Onion used to be a newspaper that was handed out for free, like, for many, many years, but as part of, like, being purchased by other media conglomerates and, like, cutbacks and various things, they Got rid of it years ago. And as I understand, the newspaper, like the onions newspaper subscription has gone really well. Ben Collins actually posted on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago that their goal for 2026 is to have more print subscribers than Washington Post, which is funny. Like, that's a shocking thing to think about.

A (15:41)

And also because Washington Post sucks now.

B (15:43)

In a lot of ways, where obviously owners have changed and the editorial board is like just going batshit and people are mad and mass unsubscribing. Like it seems possible. I don't know.

A (15:54)

It is possible. It's like they don't need that many more. That, that, that's what I was going to say is the Onion, I believe, is now the 11th largest newspaper in the United States, like one year after relaunching, which is really good for the Onion and very scary.

B (16:10)

Depressing as well.

A (16:11)

Depressing, yeah, for sort of like the state of newspapers in the US and yeah, on the, on the Washington Post front, I mentioned this before, but my dad used to work there. He printed the paper there when I was growing up. And they had three printing presses, like three printing plants when I was growing up. There was one In College Park, Maryland, there was one in Springfield, Virginia, and there's one in southeast D.C. and each of them had like 4ish printing presses. And these printing presses were three stories tall and like the length of a football field. Like, they're huge, Absolutely huge. And, you know, they're printing, I don't know, like a million papers every day, something like that. Huge, huge number of papers. And you know, over time, like, my dad had to go start working in Virginia when we lived in Maryland because the College park plant closed and then the, then the one in D.C. closed and then the one in Virginia still exists. But I think they've gone from like having four presses to having, I don't know, two or maybe even only one going. And so.

B (17:21)

And that's the one that still does it today.

A (17:23)

That's the one that still does it today. And that one's been around for a long time. But it's just like the, the physical infrastructure to print these things is like, I don't know, Emmanuel sending me the other day, like.

A (17:34)

Printing newspaper printing presses that are being auctioned off by like random companies at this point.

B (17:42)

But similar with book publishing. Right. I mean, I didn't have full visibility into it, but like, I remember doing like my book. You have to schedule it somewhere very specific in the year because if you don't, prints are going to be busy with something Else, you know, there's such a tiny amount of infrastructure available for this sort of thing. And obviously we're not mass producing these, but, you know, we started to find somewhere as well. And you want, I guess, just briefly, why did you want that specific printer as well, Jason? Just because you've been into it for a while?

A (18:16)

Yeah, I think it's because risograph is traditionally used for zines. Like, has a long history of being used for zines like these, you know, smaller run.

A (18:28)

Like, editions of things. And the esthetic of layering the ink, like, there's usually, like, minor imperfections in the registration, it's called, which is, like, how the colors layer and things like that. So each individual one feels a little bit more handmade versus, like, I don't know, printing it off on an inkjet printer or printing it off, you know, in a commercial printing press. And then I think it's also. It's become an art. It's become, like, a very artistic thing. And I'm not saying that we are artists, but like the printer, the. The risograph community considers themselves to be, like, doing quite a lot of art. And I think it just has led to a lot of artists who specialize in that type of printing that gave us this.

A (19:17)

Big pool of people to work with in that space. And there's a handful of different Risograph printers, printing presses across the United States. There's, I think, like two or three in Los Angeles, but almost all of them are run by, like, one or two people or they're like small collectives. And it just felt like it was kind of the right thing for us to do. To start with, I. I will say also I mentioned the Onion, but there are a bunch of other, like, really small magazines that have either launched or relaunched in the last, like, year or two. One is called Saver Magazine, which is about food. And that's another one that went out of print and has come back recently. It, like, came back in 2024 and is apparently doing pretty well. There's like, a.

A (20:06)

Mushroom enthusiast ones called Mushroom People, which is pretty cool. There's one called Wild Eye that's like a photography one. And so I think there is a new wave of magazines and print media that has popped up in the last few years. And I think.

A (20:27)

Theoretically we want to be part of it. I mean, we'll see how. How this goes again, like, people seem excited about it, but we will see, like, how it goes once we start distributing it. If people actually like it, if it is, like, a huge Logistical nightmare in terms of, like, actually mailing them and things like that. But, you know, all indications are that people, like, are interested in this, and so hopefully we will be able to do more of them.

B (20:54)

Yeah. And, you know, what other small media company relaunched its magazine? Vice Media. I'm just checking.

A (21:02)

Oh, they did. They did, yeah.

B (21:05)

To be clear, not a small independent media company, but I know that's also part of the same conversation as well. Obviously, the circumstances that led to that was, obviously, they went bankrupt, and we saw the writing on the wall, and that's why we left and made four or four media. But, you know, they've relaunched the magazine.

A (21:21)

So, I mean, that's pretty interesting you bring that up, because we were a part of vice, like, when it went from being a monthly magazine to a quarterly magazine to, like, we're going to do this only every once in a while to. We're going to shut this down.

B (21:37)

Right.

A (21:37)

And I think, you know, we did take part in a few of the magazines that came out. You know, like, there was a motherboard issue, more or less, where a lot of us ended up writing articles for it, and that was really rewarding and nice. But one thing that Vice did was they stopped. They kind of stopped promoting the magazine and having, like, launch parties and big things around it, and they started just giving it out at American Apparel. They had, like, some sponsorship deal with American Apparel, and then American Apparel went bankrupt. And so then, literally, there were a.

B (22:10)

Bunch of other issues.

A (22:11)

Well, yeah, yeah. But then there was, like, a period of time where it was impossible to get the magazine. They had, like, no distribution mechanism for it. And so, I mean, that was, like, a bummer to see. And I think that's something that has happened for a lot of magazines over the years. And I guess it's just, like, with us, you know, we're starting extremely small. This is extremely small. Extremely, like, experimental. But.

A (22:36)

That is. That's obviously a reality, is, like, it's expensive to do. It's slow. Like, you know, we wrote these articles and they will be relevant when they come out. But it's like, we wrote these articles a week or two ago. They'll come out in January. That's, like, a long lead time between us writing it and people getting to read it. And so the types of things that we can do in a magazine or a zine or any sort of printed product are different than what we can do on the Internet. But I think it is still. It's still cool and still something that is, like, worth doing.

B (23:10)

Yeah, absolutely. All right, we'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about one of Emanuel's stories about some very weird stuff that's going on with Instagram and SEO headlines. We'll be right back after this.

A (23:36)

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B (28:03)

All right, and we are back. This one by Emmanuel. The headline is Instagram is generating inaccurate SEO bait for your posts. I mean, there's a lot going on that headline, but it's also kind of, kind of right there. How about we go to the first post you saw? Like how did you first come across this and what was the thing that you that you saw.

A (28:27)

Exactly.

C (28:28)

So, as is often the case, a reader reached out, someone who is a cosplayer, or I think more accurate to say a cosplay photographer, reached out and flagged that. The author, Jeff Vandermeer, who wrote Annihilation, which is a popular book, later a movie noticed that.

C (28:56)

When he was searching for himself on Google, his Instagram posts would show up with headlines, as in the style and format of headlines, the construction of headlines with capitalized. Every word is capitalized. And that text is not something he wrote. It's not in a comment, it's not in a caption. It's not the alt text, importantly, which is an accessibility option which describes the content of an image to someone who is blind or vision impaired. Instagram generates those automatically. You can also create them or edit them manually. But this is not what we're seeing here. These are fully generated headlines for individual Instagram posts that are showing up on Google.

B (29:54)

Yeah, so just to clarify, it's. If you search for something in Google that's related to this Instagram post, I might have. You might even do the name and Instagram or subject or whatever. And it's the Google results that are having this weird, almost buzzfeed like headline. Right. It's not on Instagram itself. It's weird. It's almost a step removed. I'll read out one of these headlines and maybe you can just tell us what the post is actually supposed to be. But the headline is, meets the bunny who loves eating bananas. A nutritious snack for your pet, I think is. And so again, what was the actual video that Instagram is deciding to put some clickbait SEO headline.

C (30:39)

It's just a few seconds of a video that, again, Jeff Vandermeer posted to his personal Instagram, which is a video of a bunny eating a banana.

B (30:50)

Yeah, Very, very strange. I feel like when you first came across this, it was like something of a mystery that, like, well, what the hell is actually going on here? Because as far as I know, this is not a documented feature. I don't remember there being some sort of announcement from Instagram that, hey, we're going to start doing this. What were the next steps in figuring out what the hell is going on? Because you had to go to various different people.

C (31:16)

Yeah. So a few things. One is we wanted to be careful because alt text is.

C (31:25)

Often.

C (31:28)

Bandied about or argued about thing on the Internet. That's very important.

C (31:35)

For some people in order to use the Internet. And people get very heated up about that for good reason. And we wanted to make sure that it's not that. Right. We wanted to make sure that this isn't a accessibility feature that is misfiring or explained poorly to users. Again, Instagram does have what I think is probably a very useful good feature, which it will use computer vision and AI to kind of like look at your content and automatically generate alt text that then you can edit if you want. So, like that was one part of it.

B (32:16)

Well, and if that was the case, that also would have been probably a story as well, to be clear that Instagram's automatic alt text is being crazy.

C (32:26)

Well, it's wrong. I mean, I can say that definitively. You know, I have a screenshot of this headline you just read in the story. And underneath the headline there's what we would call and publishing a deck. Right. It's like further detail about what the post is. And it says, photo by Jeff Vandermeer on December 2, 2025 may be an image of a lighthouse. It's not an image of a lighthouse, it's an image of a bunny eating a banana. So it's wrong. And that's funny and not great, but at least it's coming from it's technology trying to do something very positive and not working perfectly, which makes sense. Happens. But again, this is now what this is. Another thing is that the reason this caught my attention is again, we are in publishing, so we're familiar with SEO. And specifically something from our time advice that we talked about a lot and.

C (33:24)

At times argued with our SEO specialist at the company about is you write a story, you put it into the cms. There is again the headline that you want people to see. There's the deck that gives a little short, snippy description of what the article is, and then the full copy of the article.

C (33:46)

Many years ago at this point, it became good practice to have a separate box.

C (33:53)

In the CMS page for your article where you would write a headline specifically for Google, right? So it's like there's the headline that you want human beings to read when they click on your page. That helps a human being understand and maybe want to read what the article is about. And there's a totally separate headline that you're writing for Google. You're writing for an algorithm which has different preferences, right? It's like you're writing it in a way that makes people click it in search results, that makes Google want to include it in search results. And there's just different, sometimes contradictory criteria. And it seemed to me by looking at the style of Headline like, the reason that we all immediately recognize the style and make fun of it and associate it with buzzfeed, which was extremely viral.

C (34:45)

In the early aughts and in the late aughts is this is what works for SEO. And it seemed to me that Instagram was making some kind of SEO play on people's individual posts without disclosing that to them.

C (35:03)

The laziest thing you can do at that point, which is what I did, is you can view page source on we're hacking now. Now we're hacking now. We're in the mainframe, we're looking at View Page source in order to see all the code, HTML css, all the stuff that it's like happening behind the scenes when you look at a webpage. At that point I discovered that there was hidden, as in not appearing on the actual post anywhere, like a pretty long and detailed description that also reads as if it's AI generated, automatically generated, and also is very SEO friendly. It's very long, it's very descriptive and includes keywords. I checked with some people who had this text embedded on their post and they were like, nope, I have no idea what this is. I didn't write it. But I couldn't find these headlines that are showing up at Google. So I contacted.

C (36:02)

Somebody who we actually consulted with a little bit about SEO before we launched 44 Media John. And I was like, hey, I can't find where these headlines are coming from. Can you help me out? He directed me to Google's Rich result test tool, which is a Google tool that anybody can access. And basically what you can do there is enter the URL and then kind of get a dump of what Google's bot Crawler, the tool that Google uses to crawl websites, this is what the bot sees when it does that. And when I looked at that, you could see that Instagram does in fact generate.

C (36:46)

These headlines. They're under the HTML title tags. They don't show up when you do view page source because they only show up for search engines. And I guess I should also add the reason I went down this path is the person who initially flagged this for me, Brian, I think understandably wasn't clear where's the headline coming from. Is Google generating that or is Instagram generating that? And I contacted both companies. Google immediately was like, this isn't us. We're getting this text from, from Instagram. You going to have to talk to them. Instagram responded to me. They were like, we're looking into it.

B (37:24)

I haven't heard back oh, so they haven't fully acknowledged or addressed the fact that it's probably an Instagram thing. No, it is an Instagram.

C (37:33)

It's definitely an Instagram thing. They haven't made any kind of statement, you know.

B (37:37)

Yeah, right, right. And what did the, just briefly, what did the people you spoke to said? Of course you spoke to Van der Meer and I think you spoke to a cosplayer as well. How do they feel about this? Like, what do they think?

C (37:52)

Yeah, I think, you know, it's, it's, it's funny to me because it hasn't happened to me. But they're understandably upset. I understand why they're upset. I think specifically Vanderme here, which tangent. But.

C (38:09)

We kind of happened to know because we had.

C (38:15)

A thing called Terraform and Motherboard Advice where we published fiction and we did publish him once, which was a big get for us. But yeah, I talked to him and he was like, yeah, I try to be very thoughtful and intentional in how I present myself on social media. Everybody's worried about social media. You don't want to waste your time. You don't want to, I don't know, be a bad influence. And then these automated tools make it so you might search for me and you'll get this kind of clickbaity.

C (38:50)

Let'S call it low brow way of presenting his content. Obviously, as a writer, as a published novelist, he's going to be sensitive to how he's represented in writing. So he doesn't like that.

B (39:04)

I mean, it looks like because you had to get all of that context for a bunch of reporting. And honestly, it was like a pain to get someone scrolling past and finding that. It's like, why is this author writing like that? That's really bad. It looks bad.

C (39:20)

Yeah. And I think that's mainly it. You know, the.

C (39:25)

The descriptions are not.

C (39:29)

Wrong in a way that will necessarily injure someone. But people feel also that the cosplayer I talk to feels misrepresented, and that's also a problem. It's like you post something on social media, you post something to your Instagram account, you're trying to portray yourself in a certain way, and then Instagram just processes it and automatically spits out a thing that you didn't want to represent you. So, yeah, people obviously not fans of this.

B (39:57)

Yeah, I totally get that. All right, we'll leave that there and we'll see if Instagram Meta gets back to you with an answer. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk about how the creator of Ice Block, you know, the ice spotting app that you've probably heard of, is now suing the US Government. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co.

B (40:26)

As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and the land free vote of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the Subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again. Between.

A (41:06)

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