News

What changed this week in how ideas get distributed: platform rules, payouts, lawsuits, shutdowns, deals.

New Jersey’s new data broker law bans the sale of sensitive personal data outright and fines violators up to $50,000 per record, and any blogger or marketer who buys third-party audience lists to target New Jersey readers now needs to check whether their vendor is registered before the state’s compliance deadlines hit.

An appeals court allowed Florida’s under-14 social media account ban to be enforced while litigation continued, but the law covers platforms meeting a specific statutory test, not every blog or app read by a teenager

YouTube doubling its watch-hour bar to 8,000 hours puts 1 in 8 channels that already cleared the old one on the wrong side of the new line, and the cutoff isn’t about quality

A Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner was accused of using AI to write his entry, and months into a review, the prize committee still hasn’t said whether that changes the win

Self-publishing produced roughly one hundred thousand ebooks a month before ChatGPT and more than three hundred thousand a month by late 2025, and Amazon has responded with upload caps and identity checks rather than checking any book’s content