The Fine Print
I recently signed on to assist America’s longest-standing living history museum, Colonial Williamsburg, with the early stages of a pilot digital content project to explore how to leverage AI both to educate the public and to support the efforts of the interpretive staff to do their work in the most informed manner possible. Colonial Williamsburg has much to celebrate in 2026, with the centennial of the museum’s founding happening this year and the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence coming up on July 4. (Not to mention that, as a privately funded museum outside of federal control, Colonial Williamsburg is still allowed to talk openly about slavery, as it began doing in the latter half of the museum’s first century, which in this climate, is reason enough to celebrate.)
The first phase of this project, as one might expect, involves training the large-language model (LLM) at the heart of the resource. This means drawing a vast array of sources into the LLM, some primary, as well as some secondary ones produced internally. The vast majority of the primary sources are philosophical treatises that informed the founders, plus letters, pamphlets, and essays that speak to the events that ushered in the revolutionary era and drove the colonies into rebellion. The project’s reliance on these older texts will raise some interesting questions about how accurately this type of LLM can decode their content on a technical level, as well as synthesize this sort of material without reproducing its biases, its racist language, and so forth, and about what types of interventions are necessary to make the project effective, particularly as a public-facing resource.
For me as a magazine editor, the element I’ve found most fascinating thus far is exposure to the several newspapers published in Williamsburg, Va., in the 18th century, all of which chose to call themselves the Virginia Gazette in an effort for their owners to establish themselves as the colony’s official printer. The owners were, in most respects, more printers than publishers, given that they employed no reporters, offered no in-house-written editorials, and did little to establish a clearly defined editorial voice. (Some of them did have killer taglines, though, particularly as revolutionary fervor rose to a boil: Alexander Purdie’s Gazette proclaimed its mission as “Always for Liberty, and the Publick Good”; William Rind’s declared itself “Open to All Parties, but Influenced by None”; John Dixon and William Hunter’s led with a Latin quote from the Roman historian Suetonius that translates roughly as, “In a free state, there should be freedom of speech and thought.” If these papers didn’t always uphold their lofty mission statements, at least they didn’t turn out to be self-fulfilling prophecies like “Democracy dies in darkness.”)
The Gazettes’ contents could seem a bit baffling at times. The last page or two of each issue typically contained a mix of brief news items and notices as well as classified ads announcing the sale of or demanding the return of property in land, goods and services, livestock, and (there’s no way to sugarcoat this) human beings. But the first two or three pages delivered some weird, wild stuff, offering a confounding and fascinating assortment of reprinted letters, reports on town meetings and congressional sessions, and spirited (if often pretentious and florid) essays submitted under real and imagined classical pseudonyms like Scipio, Brutus, Cato, Constitutionalis, Junius Americanus, Virginius, and (no joke) Mucius Scaevola.
Although the content of these newspapers comes off as random at times (and indeed it was), it’s also worth remembering that the Gazettes were widely read and discussed, and a number of these fiery essays got their readers (and auditors, when they were read aloud) hopping mad. And because of the nature of 18th-century printing, these essays (which were typically ready for typesetting before the news because they were reprinted from other publications) often ran on the front pages of Virginia’s and other colonies’ Gazettes and had an enormous cumulative impact in creating a sense of “common cause” among American colonists (around ideas noble and not so noble). In Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence (2021), historian Robert G. Parkinson wrote of these colonial newspapers, “The success of the American Revolution depended on their efforts in small, yet essential ways. They were the protectors and carriers of the news, which made them nurturers of the patriot movement. They did the dirty work.”
The idea that a motley assortment of reprinted essays—often months old—grabbed from here and there and running over pretentious Roman pseudonyms could have helped start a revolution and dramatically shrink the empire footprint of a distant king might seem far-fetched. But whether you buy Parkinson’s assertion that the prime motivating factor in making those 13 clocks (of the 13 colonies, in John Adams’s phrase) chime in unison was a ginned-up fear of slave and indigenous uprisings or you favor T.H. Breen’s claim in Marketplace of Revolution that it was an unprecedented series of consumer boycotts that pulled the colonies together and foreshadowed the passion for consumer rights that would define us to this day, reprinted newspaper essays played an outsized role in riling up far-flung readerships.
When I took over Streaming Media in 2022, I was a bit surprised to discover that the vast majority of the articles we published on our blog consisted of unsolicited guest op-eds on topics running the gamut (and then some) of our purview. It all seemed a bit random to me as an editor accustomed to cultivating long-standing author relationships and approaching editorial planning more deliberately. And that is what we do for the most part, especially in print. But opening our blog to a never-ending stream of guest contributors yields some of the coolest stuff we publish, with topics that would never occur to me. In 2026 alone, we’ve run guest bylines on topics as intriguing and disparate as “From Probabilistic to Proven: The Deterministic Turn in Audience Data Strategy,” “Planning Beyond the C-Band Auction: How IP Distribution Is Shaping What Comes Next,” and “The Post-Holiday Subscription Reset—Are Streaming Services Built for Retention?” Though I rarely know when these pieces will arrive or where they’ll come from, it is often heady, provocative stuff that I’m proud to publish. And it’s usually a good bit easier to follow—at least for 21st-century readers well-versed in streaming tech and the media industry’s travails—than the fevered neoclassical rhetorical flights of a Virginius or Junius Americanus hell-bent on, say, dismantling Parliament’s reviled Intolerable Acts with a deft stroke of his pen.
Even if America’s semiquincentennial and a year of “No Kings” protests are unlikely to deliver any incendiary essays to my inbox, it’s at least a little encouraging to note that revolutions have launched from less likely platforms.
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