Tomorrow's Publisher Latest

Dagens industri lets AI decide when readers hit the paywall

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:58:40 +0000

Bonnier News tested an in-house AI tool on half of Dagens industri’s paywall decisions
Wally matched manual controls on conversion and churn while locking a broader mix of content
The publisher plans to expand the system’s capabilities and potentially roll it out across the group

Dagens industris decision to let an AI system decide, in part, when readers hit the paywall reflects a broader shift in how publishers are trying to squeeze more value from digital audiences without alienating them. Over a two-month test carried out in the spring, Bonnier News and a cross-functional project group at Di built the first version of the system internally rather than buying an off-the-shelf solution, according to Dagens Media. The in-house route, the company said, gave it more control over both the timing and the logic of the experiment.

The tool, called Wally, was allowed to determine half of the paywall decisions during the trial, while editors and other staff handled the rest manually. Caroline Åkerlund, Di’s channel director and the editorial representative in the project, told Dagens Media that the title’s traffic and paywall activity were large enough to generate meaningful data over a limited period. That volume, she said, made Di a useful test site for understanding whether the system was improving subscription conversion or simply shifting around the moment of the lock.

The underlying idea is straightforward, if ambitious: instead of deciding in advance which article should be free and which should be locked, the system uses reader behaviour to judge when a person is most likely to subscribe and then places the wall at that moment. In practice, that means the same article may remain open for one reader and closed for another, depending on how many times they have returned, what they have already seen and how strong the system believes their buying intent to be. Åkerlund argued that giving readers more context before asking them to pay can increase their willingness to convert, because they better understand what they are buying.

She pointed to one example involving coverage of the Strait of Hormuz. A reader checked the article several times over the course of an hour. On the third visit, the article was locked and the reader subscribed. The lesson Di appears to be drawing from cases like that is that timing matters at least as much as subject matter: a paywall that arrives too early may lose a potential subscriber, while one that arrives after interest has deepened may capture a sale.

Like many major news sites, Di’s front end contains a significant amount of live coverage, including fast-moving market updates and agency copy tied to the stock exchange. Those items were excluded from the AI-driven paywall test, leaving the system to work on other kinds of journalism where reader intent is easier to infer and the value proposition can be built more deliberately. That distinction matters, because a paywall that is too aggressive on routine information can frustrate readers, while one that is too permissive risks leaving money on the table.

For now, the early verdict is that Wally has not dramatically outperformed the manual approach, but it has also not underperformed it. According to Dagens Media, the AI-led version matched the human-controlled paywall on conversion and churn. More interestingly for the project team, it locked a wider mix of content, giving the company a broader picture of which articles are capable of converting readers and which are not. In experimentation terms, that may be more valuable than a narrow win: the system has produced a larger set of signals to refine the model further.

Di has been encouraged enough by the results to keep Wally responsible for 50 per cent of locking decisions, so the team can continue gathering data and improving the tool. At present, the system operates on predefined rules rather than learning autonomously, but further down the line the company wants it to become more self-adjusting. Another priority is extending the tool into the app; at the moment, it works only on desktop. Bonnier News is also considering whether the model could eventually be rolled out to more titles across the group.

The Di experiment comes amid a broader wave of AI use across media and subscription businesses, many of them focused less on content generation than on reader journeys and monetisation. NTM, for example, is testing an AI-based recommendation engine at Corren that uses its existing data platform and vectorised article content to guide readers towards related stories. Elsewhere, companies outside publishing are also using AI to sharpen conversion. Superwall has documented cases in which experimentation platforms helped consumer apps optimise paywalls, including LookLab AI, which nearly doubled campaign conversion from 8.3 per cent to 15 per cent after testing different pricing and paywall formats, and Mojo, which increased subscription revenue by 14 per cent after simplifying its approach by removing credits from the paywall.

That reflects a common thread across the digital subscription economy: small changes to the point of purchase can have outsized effects. Research cited by paywall analytics providers suggests that clarity often beats complexity, whether that means showing a price more directly, reducing competing offers or making the next step easier to understand. In that context, Di’s test is less about whether AI can replace editorial judgement than whether it can make subscription moments more precise.

There is also a growing strategic reason for publishers to pay attention. Separate industry research has raised concerns about what some analysts call a “paywall penalty” in AI-driven search and answer systems, arguing that hard paywalls can reduce the likelihood that a publisher’s material will be cited or surfaced by AI tools. The implication is awkward for publishers: locking content may help short-term subscription income, but it can also limit visibility in an emerging information ecosystem where access and citation matter. For that reason, some publishers are trying to balance revenue protection with enough openness to preserve reach.

Viewed against that backdrop, Di’s experiment looks like part of a larger recalibration. Publishers are no longer only asking how to build a wall; they are asking when to build it, how high it should be and whether it should move according to the reader in front of it. For Bonnier News, the answer may eventually lie in a system that learns faster than a manual workflow ever could. For now, Wally’s chief achievement is not that it has revolutionised conversion, but that it has created a more detailed picture of how readers behave when they come close to paying.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Meta’s Canadian news blackout cuts diaspora readers off from home

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:58:03 +0000

Meta’s response to Canada’s Online News Act removed international as well as domestic news from Facebook and Instagram
Lebanese readers in Canada lost a familiar way to discover reporting from Beirut and follow events affecting relatives
The blackout has raised concerns about misinformation, emergency access and the unintended reach of platform regulation

When Meta stopped news from appearing on Facebook and Instagram in Canada, the consequences reached far beyond domestic publishers. For people in the country’s diaspora communities, the change severed an everyday link to events unfolding thousands of miles away, cutting off a familiar route through which news from home once arrived almost casually, in the middle of an ordinary scroll.

That reality is personal for the author, who moved from Lebanon to Canada and found that the reporting she had long relied on no longer surfaced in her feeds. Where she once encountered stories from Lebanese outlets such as Megaphone alongside other regular updates, she began seeing notices saying that people in Canada could not view the material. What had looked at first like distraction or overwork turned out to be something more structural: the information had not gone missing, but the pathway through which it reached her had.

Canada’s Online News Act, introduced in 2023, was designed to address the imbalance between large digital platforms and news organisations, and to help support Canadian journalism. Meta responded by making news unavailable to users in Canada on Facebook and Instagram rather than paying under the new regime. That decision affected far more than Canadian titles. Because the block applied to news content accessed in Canada, international publishers disappeared as well, meaning that a Lebanese reader in Montreal lost access to Beirut-based reporting in the same sweep that removed domestic outlets.

Critics warned from the outset that Meta’s response could weaken journalism and deepen misinformation by reducing the visibility of reliable reporting on the platforms where many people now encounter news. Canadian publishers and broadcasters later urged the country’s competition regulator to step in, arguing that the blackout threatened the viability of local journalism and narrowed public access to trusted information sources.

The implications have been especially stark during moments of crisis. During Canada’s severe wildfire season, the absence of news on Facebook and Instagram made it harder for many users to obtain timely updates, underlining how a policy framed around bargaining power and platform compensation can spill into public safety. What may look like a dispute over media economics can, in practice, alter how people learn about emergencies, how they verify rumours, and how quickly they understand whether a threat is close.

For diaspora communities, the issue is sharper still. Someone can live in Montreal while following politics in Ottawa, worrying about relatives in southern Lebanon, and keeping one eye on reporters in Beirut. In such a life, the boundary drawn by regulation does not line up neatly with the boundaries of identity, family or concern. The law may have been aimed at Canadian journalism, but the information ecosystem it disrupted was always more international, and more intimate, than that.

Other routes to news still exist. Websites, messaging apps and alternative platforms have not disappeared. Yet discovery is not the same as access. A search engine helps only once a reader already knows what to look for; a social feed often tells them that something has happened before they have the words to seek it out. For someone trying to keep track of bombardments, strikes or worsening danger, that distinction matters.

The result is a quieter kind of loss. Lebanese news has not vanished from the internet, but it has become harder to stumble upon from inside Canada. For readers whose first warning system remains a family group chat, the absence of familiar reporting means waiting for messages to pile up before beginning the hunt for answers. In that sense, the debate over Canada’s news law is not only about the economics of journalism, but about who gets to stay connected when the world outside the border is the world that matters most.

Source: Noah Wire Services

AI coding assistants are cutting developer education out of the sales funnel

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:40:40 +0000

Tailwind CSS usage has grown while traffic to its documentation and related revenue have fallen
AI coding assistants are helping developers bypass tutorials, documentation and product discovery
Developer platforms are redesigning documentation for machines as well as human readers

AI is reshaping one of software’s quietest but most important business models: developer education.

Tailwind Labs’ sale to Shopify drew attention partly because Tailwind CSS had become so widely embedded in modern web development. Adam Wathan said around the time of the acquisition that the framework was being installed more than 110 million times a week and was used by companies including OpenAI, X, Cloudflare, Reddit and Shopify. On the surface, that looked like a success story for a tool that had become near-ubiquitous.

Yet the more revealing story was what happened before the deal. Wathan has said Tailwind’s documentation traffic had fallen by roughly 40% from early 2023 even as the framework’s usage kept growing, while revenue slumped sharply. The change points to a broader disruption: the old path from developer curiosity to product discovery is being broken by AI coding assistants.

For years, the logic of the business was simple. A developer would search for help with a problem, land on Tailwind’s documentation, learn the relevant utility class, and perhaps notice a paid product, template or component suite along the way. That same pattern helped many developer-focused companies turn education into acquisition. Search traffic was not just a support channel; it was a sales funnel.

AI tools have started to cut through that funnel. Instead of opening documentation and hunting for the right answer, developers can now ask Cursor, Claude Code or similar assistants to generate the component directly. The model often already understands Tailwind well enough to produce working code, and if it does not, it can retrieve the documentation itself. The result is fewer human visits to the website that once sat at the centre of the learning process.

The pattern is not unique to Tailwind. It has been visible for some time in the wider developer-education economy, where companies spent heavily on tutorials, walkthroughs, sample applications and documentation because those assets converted later into customers. For years, that investment made commercial sense. A detailed article about building something with Next.js, for instance, could bring a developer back months later when they were solving a related problem in production.

That model is now under pressure as search itself changes. Google’s AI Overviews have been cited as reducing click-through rates to the first organic result, weakening a system that depended on developers arriving at a company’s own site after asking a question. Once the answer is supplied directly in the search results, the chance to build familiarity with the brand, product and ecosystem shrinks.

Chris Oliver’s GoRails offers a similar example in the Rails world. The site became one of the best-known Rails learning resources on the internet, with years of screencasts, tutorials and practical guides. It later expanded into products such as Jumpstart and the Rails hosting platform Hatchbox, with education helping to subsidise the rest of the business.

That balance has shifted. Oliver has said AI has been hard on education businesses and that GoRails is no exception. He has also said the company expects fewer new customers in 2026 than it saw in its first year, prompting him and Collin Jilbert to focus more of their attention on Hatchbox. The irony is striking: the same AI tools that have weakened the education side are also helping the team work faster, research unfamiliar systems, refactor applications and prototype features. The difference is that those tools now allow developers to bypass the tutorials entirely and get straight to a fix inside their own codebase.

That change alters how developers learn as well as how companies sell. The traditional model involved building a series of mental steps: search, read, follow, adapt, remember. Increasingly, the workflow is more like: build, ask, inspect, continue. Developers still consult documentation, but often only after a model produces something questionable or needs verification. The educational journey is becoming shorter, more fragmented and more dependent on AI as a first pass.

This is one reason documentation is being redesigned for both people and machines. Modern developer sites increasingly offer options such as "Copy page", "View as Markdown", "Ask AI" and integrations with MCP. Vercel’s documentation, for example, prominently exposes AI-oriented interactions alongside the usual guides. GitBook has gone further by generating Markdown versions of pages, producing llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, and supporting documentation access through MCP. The message is clear: documentation is no longer only for a human reader skimming a browser tab. It is also for a model parsing context.

The llms.txt proposal, introduced by Jeremy Howard in 2024, captures that shift neatly. It is not yet a universal web standard, and model providers have not all formally committed to using it. But the fact that documentation companies and developer platforms have moved quickly to adopt it shows how urgently they believe the ecosystem is changing. After decades spent optimising for human readers and search engines, websites are beginning to publish a second layer for AI systems.

That may sound technical, but it reflects a deeper cultural change in software development. The point is no longer simply to write better documentation. It is to write documentation that can be consumed, summarised and applied by tools acting on behalf of the developer.

None of this means developers should abandon AI and return to a pre-LLM workflow. That would be as unrealistic as refusing to use search in order to preserve the discipline of reading books. What matters is how deliberately the tools are used. When the goal is to ship, AI can remove friction with extraordinary efficiency. When the goal is to understand, the developer may need to slow down, read the primary source, ask the model to explain its reasoning, or even build part of the thing manually to retain the underlying skill.

That distinction may become increasingly important. AI appears set to become one of the most powerful teaching aids software has ever had: an always-available tutor that knows the codebase, can field unlimited questions and can generate tailored exercises on demand. Yet the default behaviour of most tools remains execution, not education. They solve the problem before they necessarily teach the person.

That is the tension running through Tailwind’s story and the wider developer-education industry. AI is making developers faster, but it is also stripping away some of the commercial value from the learning content that once surrounded them. The companies most exposed are those whose business depended on being the place developers went to learn before they built. In the AI era, the question is whether that learning still happens often enough for the old model to survive.

Source: Noah Wire Services

One in five UK adults now use AI tools to access news, Ofcom reports

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:48:01 +0000

21% of UK adults have used AI tools for news in the past year
ChatGPT is the most widely used AI news source at 13%
Trust in AI-generated news remains lower than human journalism

One in five adults in the UK are now using AI tools such as ChatGPT to keep up with the news, according to Ofcom’s latest News Report.

The communications regulator said 21 per cent of adults had used an AI app or service to access news over the past year, with ChatGPT the most widely used option at 13 per cent.

Ofcom said the figures, which are considerably higher than other estimates of AI usage for news, reflected a broader shift towards a more fragmented news environment, in which people are increasingly reaching stories through digital intermediaries rather than going directly to publishers.

Ian McCrae, Ofcom’s director of market intelligence, said the modern news diet was increasingly shaped by platforms and services that sit between audiences and traditional outlets. Ofcom’s research found that almost three-quarters of adults now get news through online intermediaries, while around six in ten still go direct to the websites or apps of news publishers.

Despite the rise of AI-assisted news consumption, trust remains a major hurdle. More than half of adults said they trusted an AI-written news story less than one produced by a human journalist, underscoring continuing scepticism about machine-generated content.

The report also places AI within a wider pattern of changing media habits. Ofcom has found that social media and video-sharing platforms remain the most common way people discover news, while its broader research suggests AI use is spreading across everyday life, alongside passive social media habits and other online behaviours.

Even so, traditional media continues to matter at key political moments. Ofcom said television was the most-used source of election news in research carried out after the May local, mayoral, Scottish Parliament and Senedd elections, reaching 62 per cent of those aware of the contests, compared with 33 per cent for online sources.

The regulator’s findings come amid wider concern about the pace of AI development and the challenge of keeping pace with new uses of the technology in public life. For now, the message from Ofcom is clear: AI is becoming part of how Britons consume news, but it has yet to displace human journalism as the more trusted option.

Source: Noah Wire Services

New York Post and TMZ launch daily celebrity news franchise

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:46:20 +0000

The New York Post and TMZ collaborate on a new daily video franchise called "The Lowdown".
The series features four one-minute segments combining journalism and entertainment reporting.
Aims to expand digital reach and capitalise on fast-paced celebrity and headline news.

The New York Post has entered into a new video partnership with TMZ, creating a daily franchise called "The Lowdown" that will run five days a week across both outlets’ websites, YouTube channels and social media accounts.

According to the New York Post’s announcement, each edition will comprise four one-minute news packages, with Post journalists hosting segments alongside TMZ reporting. The companies say the aim is to combine their respective strengths in a fast-moving format built around the kind of celebrity, entertainment and headline-grabbing coverage both brands have long pursued.

TMZ has also begun promoting the series on its own video platforms, describing it as a collaborative strand that blends the two publishers’ approaches. The franchise sits within TMZ’s wider on-demand video offering, where the company says viewers can access full-length episodes and other clips free of charge.

Early instalments have already pointed to the tone of the series, with coverage ranging from a Florida model’s alleged drink-driving crash to the arrest of a man accused of posing as a 49ers player. Another recent edition touched on Elon Musk, an AI researcher’s warning about the future and the possible release of Lindsay Clancy under a legal doctrine.

For the Post, the tie-up marks another attempt to broaden its video reach at a time when publishers are seeking new ways to package news for digital audiences. For TMZ, it extends a long-standing strategy of turning rapid-fire entertainment reporting into a repeatable video format.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Norwegian media giants unite to challenge FINN.no's classifieds dominance

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:45:11 +0000

Three major Norwegian media groups form a new joint venture to compete with FINN.no
The alliance aims to strengthen their position in digital classifieds market
Partnership reflects broader trend of traditional media diversifying revenue streams

Three of Norway’s biggest media groups have moved to create a joint venture aimed at digital classifieds, in a sign that established publishers are still looking for a stronger position in a market dominated by FINN.no.

Schibsted, Polaris and Amedia have set up a new company, with each taking a one-third stake. The venture has already been registered with the Norwegian Competition Authority, suggesting the partners are pressing ahead with plans to build a shared classifieds operation.

Schibsted’s relationship with the classifieds business has shifted sharply in recent years. After separating its news media operations from Schibsted Marketplaces in 2024, the marketplace arm was rebranded as Vend in 2025. Schibsted Media, now once again using the Schibsted name, is wholly owned by the Tinius Trust and still holds a 20.5% stake in Vend.

That background makes the new venture look like a carefully judged return to a space the company had only recently stepped away from. Rather than a full-scale comeback through its own marketplace arm, Schibsted is now partnering with other Norwegian media groups to challenge the country’s leading general classifieds platform.

FINN.no remains the clearest target. The site is widely seen as Norway’s dominant classifieds marketplace, and the new company appears designed to give local publishers a better collective chance of competing with it in digital advertising and marketplace listings.

Source: Noah Wire Services

McClatchy cuts deepen crisis as US local newsrooms face further decline

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:43:24 +0000

Over 90 unionised journalists laid off across 17 McClatchy publications, including The Miami Herald
Cuts leave local newsrooms with diminished capacity to cover government and community issues
Industry-wide fallout signals a lasting decline in local journalism amid economic pressures

McClatchy’s latest round of cuts has deepened the strain on local newsrooms across the United States, with more than 90 unionised journalists and media workers laid off at 17 publications.

The hardest hit site appears to be The Miami Herald, where 32 jobs were cut, including the whole writing staff of El Nuevo Herald, the paper’s Spanish-language publication. Carol Marbin Miller, the Herald’s deputy investigations editor, told The Associated Press that the scale of the reductions showed how severe the crisis had become. “Miami is the biggest city in Florida,” she said. “Florida is a crucial state. I can’t imagine any scenario in which Miami no longer has a vibrant, powerful news outlet. It’s just too important.”

The union said the losses amount to roughly 30 per cent of McClatchy’s unionised workforce. Other affected titles include The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

In an internal memo seen by The Associated Press, Greg Farmer, McClatchy’s executive vice-president of local news, said the company had spent five years trying to sustain local reporting investment, but concluded that “the status quo no longer works”. He said the company could not keep funding coverage where subscriber demand did not justify the expense.

The cuts reflect a broader industry pattern that has only intensified this summer. USA Today has also announced staff reductions, while the Associated Press has shifted some production work overseas and laid off US-based journalists as it continues to reshape its operations. Newsroom unions argue that the cumulative effect is leaving many communities with less scrutiny of local government, schools and other institutions.

At The Miami Herald, the impact is especially stark. The union said the paper will be left without a City Hall reporter, without its only female photographer, without its audience team and without a video producer. It also said all reporters covering Broward County had been removed.

Source: Noah Wire Services

News needs the focus of B2B publishers

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:59:45 +0000

B2B publishers excel in redefining their value propositions and embracing change
Bold pivots, like Euromoney’s shift from journalism to intelligence services, highlight adaptability
AI is viewed as an asset rather than a threat, used to enhance specialised content and customer experience

There is a lot to learn from B2B transformation projects

My first job in journalism was in B2B publishing, although in those days it was known as the trade press. I was the first employee in a small company that wrote about global custodian banks. Yeah, I'd never heard of them before either.

These are banks that look after the share certificates and cash held by pension funds and insurance companies. They make sure that when they do trades in the market that the share certificates – mostly paper in those days – and money were exchanged on time. It was very arcane and even those who worked in the field described it as “the boring bit of banking”.

At the time, I thought this job was all about teaching me how to write on a topic I didn't know or care about. But actually there were far deeper lessons that I really appreciate now.

At the heart of the publication was the ethos of providing tangible value to our readers, things that would make their jobs easier to do. Central to this was proprietary data that a consultant had sourced from banks around the world. This allowed our readers to compare their performance against their rivals in a way they couldn’t otherwise do.

We spent a lot of time sourcing guest columns from the great and good of the industry. We became the place for them to share their ideas with their colleagues. I also accumulated a lot of air miles visiting markets which were then quite unknown to people in New York and London, who were our main audience.

We charged around £1,000 a year for a subscription and rapidly built a good business. Indeed it was sold to Euromoney within three years. My bosses became rich.

I was thinking about this recently, as we've been talking to a number of bold, innovative, B2B publishers. In my opinion, they have a lot of useful learnings for their B2C counterparts. The B2B world feels like it has really embraced the idea of business transformation in a more dramatic way than their mainstream cousins.

What are the main lessons B2C can learn from B2B? Here are just a few.

1 Understand your value proposition

We have spoken to a lot of B2B publishers who are thinking hard about what they are actually for, what they really offer their customers. Some talk about being an intelligence service, others about connecting their industry’s community. I like it when they get down to brass tacks. One told us that their job is to “allow predators to find their prey” – or, more prosaically, to help firms find their clients.

Above all, the idea is that you have to understand what people are getting from you. I think a lot of B2C brands might struggle to say much beyond that they “do great journalism”. Many do, but increasingly that is available from a lot of non-traditional sources. Why should they choose you?

This deserves far more consideration than it is currently getting, especially given the speed of change in the market around us. Indeed, we often start our consulting engagements with a simple question: who are your for and what do you offer them?

2 Don’t be afraid to pivot hard

B2B publishers also seem less afraid to make big swings (I’ve been in America this week…). Euromoney, to whom my bosses sold all those years ago, has changed dramatically in the interim as the market has shifted.

They used to be the leading European magazine for the financial services industry. Now if you look at their website, you’ll see that they don’t do journalism any more.

Instead, they style themselves as “a leading provider of competitive intelligence and certification for the global banking and finance industry”. They are a benchmarking and certification business.

They did this because their traditional journalism business was no longer tenable. But I like that they had a look at how they might evolve based on the strength of their brand and acted decisively, even if it was a painful process.

3 Treat AI as a friend not a rival

The debates about how much journalists are using AI or whether they even should are less pointed in B2B publishers. Instead, we see them asking how they can turn it to their advantage.

A number are building out closed AI models built around their content and other inputs (data, sales calls, etc) from their business. In this way they feel they will be able to offer a deeper and more expert experience than any general LLM can offer. I guess we’ll find out in time if they are right but they are moving without fear.

In many cases this is framed as a conversation about how to provide a better service to readers rather than how it might affect the purity of the journalistic enterprise. I think this is a more positive way to see AI than you see in many B2C newsrooms.

Of course, there are now many people in journalism who are becoming more optimistic about the effect AI can have on our businesses, but we need to spread that feeling, and quickly.

These are just three points that jumped out at me. I’m sure there are many more examples of innovation and transformation out there. The B2C industry would do well to seek them out and learn from them.

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

Macron pushes for EU-wide social media ban for under-15s amid privacy and enforcement concerns

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:41:52 +0000

Macron advocates for a unified European ban on social media use for children under 15
The EU aims to deploy a privacy-respecting age verification app by 2026
Critics highlight challenges in rolling out secure and effective age checks across member states

French President Emmanuel Macron is pushing for an EU-wide ban on social media use for children under 15, after France’s top constitutional body blocked a similar national measure on free-speech grounds.

In a letter setting out his position, Mr Macron argued that it was now necessary to go further and seek a common European rule, rather than rely on national measures that can be challenged in court. He wants access to social networks for under-15s prohibited across the bloc, with age checks designed to be both effective and respectful of privacy.

The French president has framed the proposal as part of a broader effort to protect minors from harmful online content, while also trying to avoid accusations that such a law would amount to censorship. That is why he is calling for age-verification systems built on “robust” national and European solutions that comply with privacy rules.

Brussels has already been working on that problem. The European Commission said in April that it wanted member states to speed up deployment of an EU age-verification app, with the aim of making it available by the end of 2026. The system is intended to let users prove their age without handing over unnecessary personal data, and the Commission says it can be built into national digital identity wallets.

The Commission has also presented the app as anonymous, usable on any device, and simple to set up with an ID card or passport. Denmark, France, Greece, Italy and Spain were among the first countries expected to test the technical solution, according to the Commission.

Even so, doubts remain over how quickly such a system could be rolled out in practice. Brussels has already published a blueprint and a revised version of the verification model, but the challenge of building a scheme that is both secure and genuinely privacy-preserving has been one of the main sticking points. Critics have also highlighted that any age-checking tool can be vulnerable to technical workarounds or hacking, underlining the gap between policy ambition and implementation.

Source: Noah Wire Services

The problem with the pivot to community

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:40:25 +0000

News organisations are shifting focus towards community-building to reconnect with audiences
Success varies: B2B publishers excel while general news outlets face challenges
Building genuine communities requires patience, specialised focus, and long-term strategy

Everyone in the news business is talking about communities.

In its Future Newsrooms Study 2026, FT Strategies suggested that news is entering the “community era”, where “the new advantage shifts towards building trusted networks and communities around specific niche topics, supported by specialised editorial and product teams”.

The goal is primarily expressed through trying to bring “audience participation back in-house rather than relying on off-platform spaces”. Examples quoted included a website that introduced a Reddit-style forum for its audience, another that had structured live debates to discuss issues to be covered, and a third that offered weekly Q&As.

Just this week, Audiencers wrote about SFGATE’s new strategy for paid memberships, which focused on an app experience but also pop-up newsrooms, where members could meet journalists, and other live journalism events in the San Francisco area. Notably, the app is called Friends of SFGATE.

I have also spoken this summer to an editor-in-chief who is thinking about moving on from talking to their newsroom about audiences to emphasising the building of communities.

So, the pivot to communities™ is definitely here. And in principle it’s a really good idea, for all the reasons advanced above. But there is a question nagging at me: can news providers really build genuine communities?

For B2B publishers, the answer is obviously yes. I’ve seen this first hand with clients who as much as anyone else provide the connective tissue of their respective industries, both through their journalism and, of course, their events.

This shouldn’t be a surprise: these publications were built to serve industries and could be said to sit within them, rather than as outsiders looking in. In a recent interview, Tracy De Groose, the ceo of William Reed, said emphatically that the company was not a publishing business but rather an intelligence business that sat within the food and drinks industry.

For general news publications, the situation is a bit different. By their nature, they cover the waterfront, everything from the latest local and international political developments to sports, book reviews, fashion, beauty, business and personal finance. The group that would be interested in all that sounds more like a society than a single community.

And even if you focus your attention building a community around individual areas, does your current newsroom have the expertise and depth of coverage to make yourself the place where people will go to learn more about the subject, discuss it and make connections both with your team and other users? Are you going to beat specialist publications in this respect? It’s going to be tricky.

I also wonder if people see themselves as part of a community when they access a news product or are they happy, mostly, to be just users. For some, especially those who have commented below the line or write to the letters page, clearly it’s something more. But these are not remotely the majority. Most people have traditionally been accustomed to news being a utility, not an experience.

I’ve seen at close hand attempts to engage readers more deeply. At The Times we ran Times+ which then, as now, “offers, competitions and events”. The idea was that we would bring subscribers closer to the title so that they would be less likely to churn.

The events were great: often when we did them with our journalists we’d have queues of dozens of attendees waiting to talk to them. Everyone from the newsroom or business who went to them came away buzzing at how interested the readers were with how we did things.

The problem was that we found that the events tended to attract the same people. Literally. The people who came along were superfans who went to almost every event. We were catering to the people who were the most loyal subscribers and were never going to churn. This was definitely a community, but it was a small one.

It was telling that when we tried to rebrand the subscription as a “membership”, to try to draw people even closer to the brand, it didn’t really work. Surveys suggested that the subscribers didn’t really think that you could be “members” of a newspaper brand.

Where does this leave the pivot to community™?

For general news brands, I think the first thing to do is start thinking about communities plural. Personally, I’d suggest they give up on the idea of building a single community that encompasses the whole brand but instead focus on the areas where it has a particular speciality or loyal following. That’s where you want to bring users into the story ideation and reporting process, as well as traditional features like comments, Q&As and so on.

As ever, you need to accept that it will take time to build a brand. I was talking to a friend who has spent nearly a decade building up a community big enough that it’ll support his side project as a separate business. The work of building communities will not succeed overnight and requires patience and endless iteration. If we are to really pivot to community, it’s going to be a long haul.

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

Avoiding own goals – lessons for publishers from Fifa

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:07:24 +0000

Explores the risks of accepting external investments and diluting content exclusivity
Highlights the importance of safeguarding intellectual property and unique offerings
Urges collective action and strategic stakeholder engagement in the face of industry threats

What can news publishers learn from the own goal scored last week by Fifa?

For anyone who has been taking a summer holiday from the news or instinctively switches off when football is mentioned, The Times of London revealed that sport’s global governing body was seeking investors to buy a minority stake in its tournaments, including the World Cup. Those shares could later be traded on the open market.

Unsurprisingly, many in the footballing world were aghast at the idea that Fifa, a Swiss non-profit, would now have investors, and American ones with ties to President Donald Trump at that. The lead name among potential backers of the scheme was Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law.

Uefa, the association that governs football in Europe, home to six of the eight quarter-finalists last month, voted 55-0 among its member nations to boycott all future Fifa events, including the World Cup, if the plan went ahead. Two other confederations, representing Asia and North and Central America and the Caribbean, didn’t go quite as far as threatening a boycott but also said they opposed the move. It feels unlikely that Fifa will be able to go ahead with the fundraising as planned. (Editor's note: the project was pulled just after this was published in last week's newsletter.)

I think there are abundant lessons for publishers here, particularly in relation to how they are dealing with AI companies and others brandishing cheques in their direction.

First is that there is always a catch with accepting a cash windfall. The reasons Gianni Infantino, the Fifia president who promoted the plan, thought it would be applauded by his 211 member nations is that they would each get a share of the billions that would be raised. For the smaller countries that would represent an enormous increase in revenues. But many are now realising that once the investors are inside the tent their demands for more competitions, more teams in them, more commercials, more “hydration breaks” would be harder to resist. The game would be marching to their commercial tune rather than a sporting one.

News publishers have already seen what can happen when an initial cash boost turns into a longer-term millstone. A number of publishers did deals with Apple when they launched their Apple News+ subscription product in 2019. Some have reported decent advertising returns and see it as part of the pathway to subscription. However, the main beneficiary of this has undoubtedly been Apple, which has built what is likely to be the world’s second biggest news subscription (it doesn’t publicly disclose figures) despite producing no content themselves. From the distance of seven years, the deal feels lopsided and I know some publishers are reconsidering their part in it.

There is also the issue of preserving the exclusivity of your product. The World Cup remains the most popular sporting event on the planet partly because it takes place only every four years. Its regularity and rarity are part of its power: if you’re a football fan, you can measure your life by World Cups. Infantino has already added a club version and apparently has plans for more.

Publishers, in their deals with AI companies or Apple or whoever, need to be aware of a similar dilution effect when their content is available on platforms other than their own. I have seen this in my own news consumption: while I might decry Apple News Plus for its effect on the industry, as a consumer it’s unbeatable. I get The Times, the Telegraph, the WSJ, the Washington Post, the Australian, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York, Rolling Stone and many, many more, all for the half the price of just one of the direct subscriptions (£12.99 a month compared with £26 for The Times).

Thomas Baekdal, the media commentator and consultant, made a similar point this week on LinkedIn in talking about his latest report on what makes people pay for journalism: “Across most countries [surveyed in the Reuters Digital News Report] ‘exclusive journalism’ that isn't available elsewhere was the number one factor,” he wrote. “Think about this the next time someone talks about licensing content to AI. The single biggest threat to your future revenue potential is to not have anything unique to offer.”

This is a point worth making over and over again. There are some good reasons to do deals with AI companies but publishers must be aware that they are diluting their offer by doing so. So they must already be thinking about how to develop ameliorating products or services. In other words, you will need more than journalism to make people come to your products rather than those of the AI giants.

The Masters golf tournament is perhaps a better sporting model for publishers to follow. They guard their IP jealously, restricting the amount of TV coverage of the event, ensuring commentators use their nomenclature (for example, calling the fans “patrons”) and also not selling merchandise outside their grounds in Augusta. They are probably “leaving money on the table” but they have built an event that feels exclusive, will never suffer from overexposure and always leaves people wanting more.

Infantino has also given us a textbook lesson in bad stakeholder management. It’s another reminder that nobody likes surprises and that if you’re going to propose something radical, you need to seed it with people over time so that when you actually put it forward people have already accepted and internalised the change. Ideally, they might even think it was their idea. Sadly, I think Infantino has spent just a little bit too much time in the company of a man whose attitude towards his stakeholders is that they are mostly “losers” who can be ignored.

The threat to boycott the World Cup by Uefa is also something to note. Just the day before it was announced, commentators were hosing down the idea that its member nations might take this “nuclear option”. But they did, unanimously, and gave us all a lesson in the power of collective action. News publishers should not forget that their content is hugely valued by AI providers and they might think of taking such action.

I say “might think” but it’s probably “might have thought” as that ship seems to have sailed with all the individual deals being signed by the biggest publishers. But it is never too late to stand up for yourself.

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

Principles of paid content

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:30:42 +0000

Reach announces strategic move towards digital subscriptions and original content
Revenue drop highlights need for a new publishing approach
Content strategy based on exclusivity, expertise, and emotive storytelling

The surest catalyst for change in a news organisation is a crisis. When things are going well – or at least not too badly – there is always the temptation to defend what you have, rather than risk something new. At the World Cup, England showed how limiting a strategy that can be.

But when your back is against the wall, you don’t have a choice – you have to do something different. It doesn’t make it easy though. Sometimes you have to admit you were wrong in the past

Credit then is due to Piers North, the ceo of Reach, for saying in the UK publisher’s latest stock market release, published last month: “... We are building a stronger business by investing in digital subscriptions and video, securing greater independence from referral traffic. Our future will be less about volume and more about original content, distinctive brands and securing better returns.”

For a company whose very name, and previous strategy, embodied the traffic era of publishing this is quite a shift. But, boy, did they need to make it. Their release said that its digital revenues, which were down 11% overall, “continued to be impacted by lower referral volumes, mainly from Google. This meant that on-platform page views declined 40% year-on-year and indirect revenues, which are volume sensitive, declined 16.2%.”

If your digital revenues, realistically the only driver of future growth, are down so significantly you have to do something. However, to pivot from an advertising-based model to a subscription one is not something easily accomplished. The whole ethos of the company needs to change, from its editorial strategy to what it is selling and the way it does it.

This will be difficult to accomplish but Reach has made a decent start. Already it has 40,000 subscribers to its brands, which have quietly been introducing paywalls since last year. To really make the shift though, it needs substantially to change its offer to readers. As North said in an interview with Press Gazette, putting up a paywall is very different from building a subscription business. From an easy-come-easy-go experience, it must make its titles indispensable.

How do you do that?

Here’s a quick bit of free consulting advice on what kind of content people will pay for. We are just talking about the journalism here. There is a lot more around it of course, from marketing and pricing strategies to events and community-based products.

I make no apologies that the content approach I’m going to espouse is very much from an internal, publisher-output perspective. Meeting user needs is crucial and I am a great admirer of that approach, but if you’re in a hurry, as Reach is, you need to do something right now. These dictums are also not just conjured out of nowhere – they are the result of studying successful content at many different publishers around the world.

At the highest level, the content that people will pay for must be one of the three Es: it has to be one or more of exclusive, expert or emotive.

It’s pretty obvious what exclusive means. Survey after survey have reported that people will pay for content they can’t get elsewhere. This does not just mean scoops. They are great – more of them, please – but it’s difficult to build a newsroom operation around them. As an editor, or as a business, you simply can’t guarantee that they will land frequently or regularly. But you can build your content strategy around exclusive opinions, distinctive formats, and scoops of interpretation. The maxim should be to be different in everything you do.

Michael Gove, the former British minister who is now editor of The Spectator magazine, could not have been more wrong when he said a decade ago that “people have had enough of experts”. Every bit of performance data and content analysis I’ve seen has suggested the opposite: readers really value expertise, both of outside experts and of journalists themselves. Unsurprisingly the public are drawn to people who know what they are talking about. Seek them out and let them talk or write, and promote the ones you have in the newsroom.

Finally, emotive – people want to feel something. This doesn’t mean playing with their emotions but is primarily about producing content that builds a human connection. Stories should always have a people element, whether they are about some government policy change or a diplomatic storyline. What does this development mean for real people? If your reporters file a story without a case study, send it right back to them.

Of course, these principles serve as a starter. There is a lot more detail to be worked through in the implementation and every publication has its unique areas of advantage (at least, they should!). But as general rules go, these are a good starting point. Then it’s a matter of talking to subscribers and crunching the data to see if your hunches were right.

One last pointer for Reach: subscription is a long game. Be prepared to wait for months, maybe even years for decisions you make now to pay off.

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

SCMP unveils redesign emphasising AI-enabled digital

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:23:15 +0000

South China Morning Post revamps print and online platforms with a focus on analysis and visual appeal
Introduction of AI tools enhances digital research and user experience
Repositioning reflects long-term strategy of adaptation and globalisation in media

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) has unveiled a redesign of both its print newspaper and digital platforms as it seeks to keep pace with changing reading habits and an increasingly AI-driven media environment.

The revamp is aimed at making the title feel more useful to readers who want fast updates on screens and deeper context in print. Chow Chung Yan, the paper’s editor-in-chief, said the shift reflects how audiences now use different formats for different purposes, with digital delivering immediacy and print offering space for reflection and analysis.

SCMP is presenting the overhaul as the latest stage in a long process of reinvention. The paper has spent much of the past decade pushing further into digital and international readership, seeking to widen its appeal beyond Hong Kong while remaining focused on coverage of China and the wider region.

The new print edition has been repositioned as a more curated, magazine-like product, with heavier emphasis on analysis, reporting and visually distinctive presentation. Chow said the paper is strengthening investigative work, expanding explanatory journalism and improving storytelling as part of that shift.

On the digital side, SCMP has introduced a cleaner navigation system, more multimedia content and a new AI-enabled search function that draws on its archive of reporting. The company says the aim is to make it easier for readers to research subjects and move between stories, while offering a more polished experience across the website and app.

Tammy Tam, the publisher, described the redesign as both a product upgrade and a commitment to quality journalism. Alongside the relaunch, the retail price of the newspaper has been raised from HK$18 to HK$20.

The move also fits a broader pattern among Hong Kong publishers, several of which have been reworking their digital products and experimenting with AI tools to present news in more flexible formats. Ming Pao has recently partnered on a generative-AI project to convert written journalism into audio, video and other assets, while The Standard refreshed its mobile and desktop interfaces earlier this year.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Hearst takes full control of A+E Global Media in $1.2 billion deal

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:16:39 +0000

Hearst acquires Disney’s half-share in A+E Global Media for $1.2 billion
Move marks Disney’s strategic shift from linear television to streaming and sports
A+E continues expansion under Hearst, strengthening international content reach and multiplatform growth

Hearst has agreed to buy The Walt Disney Company’s half-share in A+E Global Media for about $1.2 billion in cash, giving the privately held media group full control of a television business that includes A&E, Lifetime and the History Channel, according to Reuters.

The sale, announced this week, is expected to complete in September. Once the transaction closes, A+E Global Media will sit entirely within Hearst’s entertainment arm, ending a long-running 50-50 ownership structure between Hearst and Disney that has been in place for more than a decade.

Disney’s decision to sell fits a wider effort to concentrate capital on streaming and sports, while reducing exposure to declining linear television assets. The company has been steadily reshaping its portfolio as cable subscriptions continue to fall and legacy channels lose some of their value in a shifting media market.

A+E Global Media reaches more than 414 million households in 200 territories and 40 languages, and its channels have remained a meaningful part of the international factual and entertainment landscape. In March, the company announced a new multiyear deal with Nielsen covering audience measurement and media intelligence across its linear and digital brands, underscoring its continuing focus on advertising and programming strategy even as ownership changes.

In April, A+E also joined Mercurius Media Capital as a strategic limited partner, a move that highlighted its efforts to deepen ties with consumer brands and expand its multiplatform audience monetisation. The company has said it will continue to grow its content business across platforms and markets after the change in control.

Hearst chief executive Steven Swartz said the company looked forward to supporting Paul Buccieri and his leadership team as they continue building around the History, Lifetime and A&E brands. Buccieri, president and chairman of A+E Global Media, said the business would keep expanding its content reach internationally.

For Hearst, the deal strengthens an entertainment portfolio that already spans newspapers, magazines, healthcare information and financial services, while also increasing its indirect exposure to ESPN through its 18 per cent stake in the sports network. For Disney, the sale marks another step away from traditional television and towards businesses it sees as offering stronger growth.

Source: Noah Wire Services

BuzzFeed cuts jobs in pivot towards streaming

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:15:49 +0000

Byron Allen cuts 35% of BuzzFeed's workforce to improve profitability
Restructuring aims to shift focus towards streaming via Local Now
Company plans significant cost savings and content realignment

Byron Allen has begun a sharp overhaul of BuzzFeed, cutting about 180 jobs and contract roles across BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Tasty in what amounts to roughly 35% of the workforce.

The reductions, disclosed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, are the first major restructuring since Allen’s family office took control of the digital publisher in May. BuzzFeed said the move is designed to simplify operations, lower costs and help restore profitability. At the end of December 2025, the company said it employed 507 people across five countries.

The company expects restructuring charges of between $6.5 million and $8.5 million, most of them to be recognised in the third quarter. It also forecasts annual cost savings of between $29 million and $32 million.

That saving is significant when compared with the terms on which Allen acquired control. His family office paid $120 million for the business, but only $20 million of that was cash. The remaining $100 million was structured as a promissory note due in five years, with interest set at 5% a year.

BuzzFeed executives told staff in an internal memo that the changes were necessary to place the business on a more durable and profitable footing. They said management had spent time reviewing cost-saving options and trying to protect jobs before deciding the cuts could not be avoided.

Allen has been blunt about the challenge. "The money is the easy part," he said, arguing that he had taken on harder business tasks and that BuzzFeed’s difficulties were smaller than they appeared.

The takeover also brought a change at the top. Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s co-founder, stepped down as chief executive and became president of BuzzFeed AI, while Allen took over as chairman and chief executive.

His longer-term plan is not simply to run BuzzFeed as a traditional digital publisher. Instead, he wants to fold BuzzFeed and HuffPost into Local Now, the free ad-supported streaming service within Allen Media Group, and use the combined brands to build a larger streaming proposition. Allen has said free streaming is the biggest opportunity in the industry and that his existing ad-sales operation can quickly monetise the assets.

An internal memo said BuzzFeed Studios will operate as an independent business unit within BuzzFeed Inc, while content and technology teams focus on audience growth, revenue and profitability. That structure suggests a shift away from a large editorial operation and towards a model more closely aligned with content supply for streaming distribution.

BuzzFeed is due to report second-quarter results on 4 August, when it is expected to give more detail on the restructuring and the progress of its integration with Local Now.

For Allen, who built Allen Media Group from a television production business into a wider media portfolio that includes broadcast stations, cable networks and The Weather Channel, BuzzFeed is a relatively small but telling acquisition. The question now is whether the savings from this first round of cuts can buy enough time to build the kind of audience and advertising base his streaming strategy requires.

Source: Noah Wire Services

The new book all journalists should read

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:56:54 +0000

Highlights the importance of integrating AI in newsrooms to foster meaningful change
Emphasises the need for journalists and managers to view AI as a tool for value creation
Warns of cultural hurdles and stress on verifying information in the AI era

Need some summer reading? This week’s newsletter comes in the form of a book review. Not perhaps a suggestion for the sun lounger, but nevertheless one that every journalist should read. It’s called AI in the News Room and it was written by Martin Schori, former head of the AI Hub at Aftonbladet in Stockholm and now the co-founder of Hint Media.

Martin is a journalist turned evangelist for AI in news and his advice is rooted in this newsroom experience. He provides tips for journalists, managers and AI specialists alike, but core to his guidance is the idea that AI is not just for the technically adept. “Development work actually needs those of us who are not tech nerds – the people who can formulate relevant problems, set boundaries, understand target groups (and editorial teams!), and think journalistically,” he writes.

This book functions as a practical guide for how to embed AI in your newsroom. I will leave you to buy the book to read Martin’s invaluable advice on this front. What I’m interested in is his thinking about the philosophical and more challenging aspects of AI implementation

He is emphatic that AI is not just a tool to make our lives easier or more efficient. Instead it must be a catalyst for change. “If journalism wants to matter in an AI era, we have to stop protecting legacy workflows and start designing for people,” he says. He adds that while the arrival of the internet disrupted the distribution of news, AI will primarily disrupt its production (while acknowledging that it will affect distribution too).

This feels important. Newsrooms felt they could largely leave the internet revolution to other people – mostly the “kids” in their digital teams – as it was a transformation was happening, or seemed to be happening, after they had done their work. This had a profound negative impact on the industry’s digital fortunes. This time, though, the change will be anchored in the actual day-to-day activities of journalists and there is a recognition that this is definitely a revolution we can’t sit out. I think this is a good thing.

Martin recognises that there are cultural hurdles to overcome. He wisely says that we should stop talking about AI as a thing in itself and instead talk about the products/tools and value that it can produce because “people are sick of hearing about AI”.

As a veteran of newsroom transformation projects, to me this feels crucial. A decade ago I used to talk to my team about how the main part of our job was to be salespeople for digital and to always be selling. And of course the best salespeople don’t flog products, they sell outcomes. For journalists the outcome they want will never be just “using AI”, but offer them better stories and they’ll bite your hand off.

This understanding of how newsrooms actually work runs through the book. Martin knows that each one contains groups of people with different attitudes to change. He names them “The excited”, “The uninterested” and “The opponents”, three immediately understandable groups. To win over the second and third, or at least to stop them killing your ideas, Martin says the newsroom’s middle managers are key: “In the end, people do what their boss says. So if you want change, don’t forget the middle managers.”

Martin is also keen to warn what we have to avoid. Notably, “We must do journalism that cannot be summarised in three points” and “We need to get better at verifying all information, not just videos that could be deepfakes”. Again these are areas where the newsroom must take responsibility. We can’t just complain about it. “If audiences receive poor quality material,” says Martin, “it doesn’t matter whether it came from a language mode, a Google search or from language skills picked up in fourth grade.”

AI will cause mistakes, just as humans will always do. But Martin is emphatically not a pearl-clutcher but someone who believes AI can herald a positive transformation in journalism. An enduring theme of the book is that we should take this opportunity to rethink how we create value for our users. We haven’t been good at this in the past, he says, and I agree.

Now there is an opportunity though. “We should use AI for tasks that require less cognitive effort, in order to free up time and attention for those that need more,” he says. Later in the book he picks up on this theme: the idea that we need to reconnect with what journalism is all about. “Imagine if, thanks to AI, we could reclaim what perhaps disappeared first when journalism went digital: presence, curiosity, time to see patterns. And maybe to truly listen.”

This sits alongside his observation that the volume era of journalism has led to an emphasis on writing as the heart of the profession when actually it should be reporting. And that’s something that AI will never – we hope – be able to do.

All in all, this is both a practical and thoughtful guide to the revolution that will reshape our industry.

AI in the News Room is available from Martin’s website

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

Beatsquares secures $2 million to accelerate AI-driven content repurposing

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:21:07 +0000

Berlin-based startup Beatsquares raises $2 million in seed funding to enhance its AI platform
The platform converts editorial content into multiple formats across digital channels
Funding will support team expansion and international growth efforts

Berlin-based AI startup Beatsquares has raised $2 million (about €1.8 million) in seed funding to expand its platform for automatically repurposing editorial content across multiple digital channels.

The round was co-led by IBB Ventures and XTR Capital, with participation from ddvg, Dutch media investor V-Ventures and a group of business angels. It follows a $500,000 pre-seed investment secured in late 2024.

Founded in 2024, Beatsquares aims to extend the reach of publishers' content as audiences fragment across an increasing number of platforms. Its AI agents convert existing editorial content into multiple formats and languages while seeking to preserve each publisher's editorial style and tone. The platform can automatically generate social media posts, newsletters, on-site content and AI-produced podcasts from existing journalism.

The company is already working with publishers including Süddeutsche Zeitung and Tagesspiegel, as well as exhibition organiser Messe Berlin.

The new funding will be used to expand the company's engineering and commercial teams, develop its AI platform and support international expansion.

"Media companies produce first-class content, yet that valuable work reaches only a fraction of its potential audience," said René Bosch, founder and chief executive of Beatsquares. "We ensure our clients' journalism reaches audiences where they are today. Now it's about speed."

Rayk Reitenbach, investment director at IBB Ventures, said Beatsquares had developed a product that addressed the challenge of audience fragmentation while drawing on the editorial experience of its team, which includes a former director of public broadcasting in Germany, a deputy editor-in-chief of Bild, a WPP executive, a McKinsey partner and the former head of product at Axel Springer.

Time for a Media Festival of Failure

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:52:06 +0000

Suggestion for industry-focused 'Festival of Failure' to promote open discussion of setbacks
Critique of current journalism events highlighting repetition and lack of actionable takeaways
Advocates for shorter days, more networking, and panels focused on failures to foster growth and innovation

“I want to start an uncomfortable conversation: Are there too many journalism events?”

So said Marcela Kunova, the owner and operator of journalism.co.uk (JUK), last week.

She continued: “I just looked at my agenda and JUK events calendar. It's gone out of hand. Conferences, festivals, summits, workshops, talks, congresses, study tours, awards. Dozens of great events are clustered between April and June and from September to November; sometimes three or five happen at the same time. They are all great – speakers, topics, organisation. I root for all of them. It's just TOO MUCH.”

She asked if anyone else felt that way and in the comments underneath her post the consensus was that yes, they did.

I’m going to take a contrary view. I think the journalism industry needs to discuss its issues and share its learnings more, not less often. I agree with Marcela’s point about scheduling but the main problem I have with events is that I don’t think all of them are great, though many are and will remain key events in my personal calendar.

Too often they feature the same speakers you saw at the last conference talking about the same old topics (newsletters are an important retention tool, you say?), and you come away with not a whole lot of actionable information or new ideas.

I have some very quick fixes. First, make the days shorter. As the sessions move towards the evening, the amount of phone-checking among attendees increases; people can only concentrate for so long. Nobody wins from a “packed agenda”. Finish at 4pm.

Second, make more time for networking. This is the main reason people attend conferences. Props to WAN-IFRA which scheduled very long lunch breaks for its recent annual congress; though maybe that was because it was in France (wine was also served).

Third, panels should only be one moderator plus one interviewee or one plus two maximum. Otherwise nobody gets a chance to say anything of consequence.

Talking of which, here is my modest proposal. I think media conferences should be more about discussing failures than successes.

I firmly believe in Michael Jordan’s maxim of “you win or you learn”. He talked a lot about how the shots he missed contributed more to his greatness as a NBA player than the ones he made. I can relate to that – at a very much less exalted level, lest you think I am in any way comparing myself to him.

If I think about my career at The Times I learnt the most from failures like our international app – which had great content, a clean and appealing design, but a very difficult route to actually paying for it; or my mistakes in hiring – great team members tend to be great in their own way, bad ones have certain traits you should spot at interview; or the shortcomings of our digital transformation – too many to go into there…

The wins can be the result of great ideas but equally might be the result of a happy accident of timing or a stroke of luck. Would The Times’s subscription offer had taken off had it not been launched at the same time as the iPad? Or if Steve Jobs hadn’t decided to bring Rupert Murdoch in on the launch?

Equally, failures are not just about bad ideas – timing, budgets, personnel, poor internal processes, tech issues can all play a part. By really digging into them, in a no-fault way, we can learn to reduce the effect of these influences to the fewest possible.

So I propose a Media Festival of Failure, in which publishers are encouraged to talk about the app launches that fell flat, the new products that nobody wanted, the new ways of working that everyone hated, the AI tools that just produced gibberish. No glorious successes allowed (and frankly I wonder how many of those we are shown at conferences are privately regarded as such by those presenting them). But lessons galore.

Maybe it's because I’ve been marinated in Britain’s culture of self-deprecation that I find stories of things going wrong much more entertaining than tales of triumph. But they are also important and useful.

I know internal comms teams will find this idea horrifying. Too many presentations are limited by their flattening hands. We must tell them to relax and realise that ultimately they’ll be telling better stories about their companies if we are allowed to do the same.

Anyone up for this conference? (Or is it another idea from which I’ll have to learn?)

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

Disney’s 20th Television forms first-look deal with Vox Media

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:47:25 +0000

Disney-owned 20th Television partners with Vox Media Studios to develop scripted and unscripted projects
Focus on adapting journalism and podcasts from Vox Media brands for Disney+ and other outlets
Partnership reflects industry trend of transforming established media content into premium streaming entertainment

Disney-owned 20th Television has struck a multi-year first-look agreement with Vox Media Studios, broadening a relationship that will give both companies room to develop scripted and unscripted projects built around Vox Media’s reporting and podcast brands.

The deal is expected to feed into Disney Entertainment Television outlets including Disney+, with a particular emphasis on adapting material from New York Magazine and Vox Media podcasts. Vox Media said the partnership will span multiple platforms and is designed to turn long-form journalism into premium television.

Karey Burke, president of 20th TV, said the agreement would allow the studio to explore material from New York Magazine’s reporting and the wider Vox Media Studios slate, while Dana J. Olkkonen, head of Vox Media Studios, described the tie-up as a significant step that underlines the appeal of the company’s journalism to television audiences.

Vox Media Studios has already supplied Hulu with unscripted fare such as "Best in Dough" and "Secret Chef". The former centres on pizza fans competing for a cash prize, while the latter follows ten chefs in anonymous blind tastings, showing the studio’s experience in packaging distinctive editorial ideas for streaming audiences.

The new arrangement also reflects a wider industry appetite for established media brands with recognisable voices and built-in story pipelines. For Vox Media, it adds another route for adapting its reporting into entertainment; for Disney, it offers a way to mine journalism-led concepts for future streaming and television projects.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Turn and face the strange

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:18:59 +0000

The BBC’s shift towards social media prioritisation sparks debate over traditional news formats
Internal resistance to technological and structural changes persists across news organisations
Industry stability and lack of strategic thinking hinder adaptation to digital disruptions

Why is the news industry so resistant to change? It’s almost impossible to shift focus, reassign resources, introduce new working practices, or change to a new CMS without a hue and cry.

This week it has been the BBC’s turn to get it in the neck for what seemed to me to be two very sensible decisions.

First, guidance went out to its reporting staff that they should prioritise social media over traditional linear programmes when it came to filing their content.

For a national broadcaster that needs to meet the British public where they are – and lest we forget, the majority now get their news from social platforms – this seemed an obvious course of action. In fact, maybe it was one the BBC should have taken earlier to ensure it was reaching younger audiences who have always been social and video first in their news consumption.

To many though, the decision meant the barbarians were at the gate. Today, its flagship morning news programme on Radio Four, was felt to be in particular peril. One insider told The Guardian: “This feels like a tweak but it’s actually a body blow … the plan appears to be for Today to hear from, for instance Steve Rosenberg [the BBC’s Moscow correspondent] if Putin dies, only after Steve has satisfied people who get their news on TikTok. Those 10 minutes serve to chip away the relevance of Today to the life of the nation. This is an act of vandalism pure and simple.”

Really? I’d say it is a natural response to the overall change in audience patterns, as described above. And anyway, Today is not what it was. It has slumped in listeners from nearly 8m a week in its 2010s peak to just above 5m now. Its audience is greying fast – the average age is 56 and heading up. And it hasn’t had a dedicated reporting team for years now. Should the BBC really not prioritise instead the places to which its listeners and viewers have migrated?

Second, the sports department were criticised for anchoring their coverage of the World Cup in Salford, rather than from New York, as its rival ITV has done. In the past the BBC has spent big to build sets overlooking key local landmarks in host countries, such as the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Red Square in Moscow and Copacabana Beach in Rio. This time its presenters are staying at home.

Of course, many compared their studio unfavourably with ITV’s cinematic view of lower Manhattan from a Brooklyn rooftop. The commercial broadcaster even paid for the floor to be raised so the Statue of Liberty would sit just over the lead presenter’s shoulder. Lovely, but is that what the BBC should have spent its taxpayer-funded money on?

Credit to Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC’s director of sport, for coming out on the front foot against the detractors. "The actual end product people are getting at home, I don't really think it's that different," he said. "If these people were sitting somewhere else, would your viewing be massively changed?” No, but it’s different, so people get overwrought.

This is not just a BBC thing, though of course its opponents like nothing better than to leap on their perceived mistakes. The internal battles at news organisations might not make it to the media pages as often but they are relentless. Take the union at a large publisher which argued that AI should not be used for any task that could possibly be done by a human. Or the revolt against a new CMS by senior staff who tried to get the old one reinstated despite an 18-month change programme. Or the editorial team that refused to use performance data.

I know the news industry is not unique in being resistant to change, but it is particularly pronounced and it crosses national boundaries. When I think about why it is the case, two reasons spring to mind.

First is that the industry was so stable, and unchanging, for so long that the status quo became entrenched to the point of ossification. Whether in newspapers, radio, TV or the early internet, the business model was pretty static and the profits were good for decades if not longer. In that environment, why would you even countenance change? Let the good times roll and don’t do anything that might possibly upset them.

Now, however, we are in a situation where the dynamics of the industry is changing almost by the month with the advent of AI and the accompanying policy changes of Google and social companies to meet this challenge. In a world of instability, we will need to get used to this uncertainty. I know of one management team at a news organisation that is constantly being asked by its staff when the seemingly non-stop restructuring and changes to working practices will stop. The answer, in truth, is “never”.

The second reason speaks to the widespread lack of understanding among journalists about the market and technological forces affecting their business. This is not the result of a lack of curiosity, but rather because their days are spent in a maelstrom of ever-changing activity – aka the news – so they don’t really have time to sit back and think about the business of journalism. I worked on a Sunday paper for many years and only for events like the World Cup did we ever think about what was happening after the following weekend. It was all about getting the next issue out. Anything beyond that? We’ll think about that later.

Many news executives admit privately that they suffer from this time-poor myopia. “I just don’t have enough time to think strategically,” one said to me recently. “There’s always so much going on.”

They need to find that time more than ever. Newsrooms of all types need to be told that change is now part of standard operating procedure. Executives need to be on top of the issues so they can make the best case. Then we’ll move faster and with greater purpose as an industry.

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

Prince Harry loses High Court case against Daily Mail

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:48:53 +0000

Prince Harry and six others failed to prove unlawful information gathering by Daily Mail
Court rules claims of systemic phone hacking and bugging are unsubstantiated
Verdict marks a major win for Associated Newspapers and shifts legal climate for press scrutiny

Prince Harry and six other high-profile claimants have lost their High Court case against Associated Newspapers Ltd, publisher of the Daily Mail, in a ruling that is likely to draw a line under the UK's long-running phone-hacking litigation.

Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed all claims against the publisher after an 11-week trial, finding that the claimants had failed to prove the information in the articles at the centre of the case had been obtained through unlawful means.

The group of claimants – Prince Harry, singer Elton John, David Furnish, actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, former Liberal Democrat minister Simon Hughes and Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence – alleged that Associated had engaged in systematic unlawful information gathering over two decades.

Their legal team said the publisher had carried out "habitual and widespread" wrongdoing, including phone hacking, tapping landlines, bugging homes and cars and making corrupt payments to police officers to obtain stories. The case focused on 55 articles published between 1997 and 2015.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Nicklin said the claimants had not established that the information was obtained illegally. He said the court could not infer unlawful activity simply because it was one possible explanation for how a story had been sourced if there was also a realistic lawful alternative.

Throughout the trial, Associated rejected the allegations, describing them as "lurid" and "preposterous". The publisher said its reporting came from legitimate sources, including press officers, public records and information circulating within celebrities' social circles.

Following the ruling, an Associated spokesperson described the decision as "an overwhelming victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists, and for a free press generally", adding that it represented "a magnificent vindication".

The spokesperson said no credible evidence had been produced to support some of the most serious allegations, including claims that journalists had bugged homes and cars, intercepted live telephone calls or accessed bank accounts unlawfully. They added that the judgment had fully vindicated the company's journalists.

The decision leaves the claimants facing a substantial legal bill, with the total cost of the litigation estimated at up to £50 million.

Prince Harry played a central role in the case, becoming the first claimant to give evidence. He told the court that reporting by the Mail's titles had made his wife's life "an absolute misery". Former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre was among dozens of editors and journalists who gave evidence denying the allegations.

The judgment marks a significant victory for Associated and a setback for Prince Harry's wider campaign against sections of the British tabloid press. It is also expected to reduce the prospect of further large-scale civil litigation arising from historic allegations of unlawful newsgathering.

Sky to acquire ITV’s media and entertainment arm in £1.6 billion deal

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:07:45 +0000

Sky agrees to a £1.6 billion takeover of ITV’s media and entertainment division.
The deal aims to create a stronger UK rival to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and YouTube.
Completion is expected in the second half of 2027, subject to approval.

Sky has agreed a £1.6 billion takeover of ITV’s media and entertainment arm in a move that would combine one of Britain’s best-known commercial broadcasters with the pay-TV group owned by Comcast, creating what the companies say will be a stronger domestic rival to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and YouTube.

ITV’s public service obligations are set to remain in place, while Sky said ITV News and Sky News would continue to operate as separate editorial voices.

The transaction, announced on Monday and subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, would bring together ITV’s free-to-air channels and ITVX streaming service with Sky’s subscription television business. ITV Studios, the production arm behind programmes including Love Island, Coronation Street and Rivals, would remain separate and continue to supply content to the merged group and to third-party buyers.

According to the companies, the deal values the business at up to £1.6 billion and comprises £1.2 billion in cash, the transfer of Love Productions, producer of The Great British Bake Off, and a performance-linked earn-out of as much as £200 million. ITV said the agreement follows months of talks that were first disclosed last November and that completion is expected in the second half of 2027.

The announcement marks a major shift in a media landscape that has been transformed by the rise of streaming and short-form online video. A combination of Sky and ITV would create Britain’s largest commercial broadcaster and, according to industry commentary cited in the reporting around the deal, could account for a substantial share of the UK television advertising market.

The companies also said the tie-up would provide the scale needed to invest in British programming at a time when traditional broadcasters are under pressure from global platforms with far deeper pockets.

ITV chairman Andrew Cosslett said the deal was designed to build a stronger UK-based competitor in a market increasingly dominated by international streaming groups. Sky, meanwhile, portrayed the acquisition as part of a broader effort to create a commercial streaming champion for the UK.

For ITV, the sale would leave the company focused on production rather than channel ownership, continuing a transformation that has been under discussion for months. For Sky, it would deepen its footprint in advertising-funded television and streaming just as regulators and lawmakers prepare to scrutinise the impact of media consolidation on competition, news provision and plurality.

Source: Noah Wire Services

AP advances India hub to boost visual journalism amid US job cuts

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:48:19 +0000

Associated Press plans new production hub in India to focus on video and photo content
US-based visual journalism teams face layoffs as part of strategic realignment
Union criticises outsourcing and warns of job losses in the US and globally

The Associated Press is pressing ahead with plans to build a production hub in India, even as the move is expected to deepen job losses for its US-based visual journalism teams.

In a memo to staff, executive editor Julie Pace said the agency was trying to strengthen its business so it could continue delivering “fact-based, nonpartisan news” to a global audience. She argued that visuals are central to AP’s future and said the new hub would expand the organisation’s video and photo capacity while improving speed and quality. Pace also said the company was examining production changes in other international locations.

The decision underlines a broader shift at AP towards visual journalism and away from some print-focused operations. According to The Washington Post, the company recently completed a round of 20 layoffs among US-based journalists after offering buyouts to more than 120 staff earlier in the year, with about 40 accepting. AP said at the time that the restructuring was intended to align its operations with changing customer needs.

The union representing AP journalists was sharply critical. The News Media Guild said the layoffs showed “just how directionless AP leadership has become” and objected to what it described as outsourcing production work to India, warning that staff in the United States and elsewhere were being displaced.

Pace defended the strategy by pointing to India’s large, digital-first media sector and AP’s existing experience hiring there. She said the company had already tested production hiring in the market earlier this year and noted that other news organisations have expanded in India in recent years. Her message framed the shift as part of the demands facing an independent global news organisation without the support of a large corporate owner.

AP, founded as a co-operative and long proud of its editorial independence, has spent recent years adapting to a media market in which newsrooms increasingly prioritise video, photographs and other visual formats. The latest move suggests that restructuring is far from over, and that more changes could follow in other regions as the agency seeks to reshape its production model.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Getty withdraws from $3.7 billion merger with Shutterstock

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:47:14 +0000

CMA insists on sale of Shutterstock’s editorial assets, leading Getty to withdraw from the deal
Merger collapse highlights contrasting approaches to AI-driven content markets
Getty faces financial pressure following the deal’s termination amid regulatory hurdles

Getty Images is set to walk away from its $3.7 billion tie-up with Shutterstock after the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority insisted on a remedy the company was unwilling to accept: the sale of Shutterstock’s entire editorial business before completion.

According to the CMA’s final ruling on 15 May, the combined company would have raised competition concerns in the supply of editorial photography to UK media outlets. The regulator said stock imagery was not the main problem, but editorial coverage of news, sport and celebrity events was. It concluded that Shutterstock’s editorial arm would need to be sold to a buyer approved by the watchdog if the merger were to proceed.

The assets in question include Rex Features, Splash News and Backgrid, businesses that are important suppliers of paparazzi and entertainment photography. Getty had proposed a narrower remedy, but the CMA decided that was not enough to preserve competition in the market.

Getty said on 30 June that its board had unanimously decided not to accept the condition and would terminate the agreement instead. The deal is due to lapse on 6 July, and Bloomberg reported that the collapse will trigger a $40 million break fee. Shutterstock shares fell sharply in after-hours trading, while Getty’s stock rose slightly.

The merger had been announced in January 2025 as a “merger of equals”. Under the terms, Getty shareholders were to own about 54.7% of the combined company, with Shutterstock investors holding the rest. The enlarged group would have kept the Getty Images name and ticker, and had forecast annual cost savings of up to $200 million by the third year.

The US Department of Justice cleared the transaction in February without conditions, leaving the British regulator as the decisive obstacle. The CMA began its inquiry in June 2025 and moved it through a full Phase 2 review before issuing its final report this spring.

The rejection also underlines how differently the two businesses have positioned themselves in the age of artificial intelligence. The CMA said competition in stock content remained robust, in part because of pressure from generative AI tools such as MidJourney and DALL-E, as well as from Adobe and Canva. But it drew a sharper distinction around editorial photography, where media buyers need real-world coverage that AI cannot replicate.

The collapse leaves Getty facing not only the loss of the transaction but also heavier financial strain. The company raised $628.4 million in senior secured notes last year to help fund the deal, and unwinding it is expected to increase refinancing pressure on a business already carrying substantial debt.

It also arrives days after Getty unveiled a partnership with OpenAI to surface licensed images inside ChatGPT responses. Shutterstock, by contrast, has already licensed content to OpenAI for model training, leaving the two companies with different approaches to the same disruptive technology.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Economist introduces low-cost audio-visual subscription for younger audiences

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:42:44 +0000

Economist launches Economist Play, a $15/month multimedia bundle combining videos, podcasts, and newsletters
Strategy aims to reach a younger, gender-balanced audience with mobile-first content
Emphasis on newsroom authenticity through faces and voices, moving away from anonymity

The Economist has launched a lower-cost subscription bundle built around audio and video, in a move designed to reach younger and more gender-balanced audiences while squeezing more value from its expanding multimedia output.

The new product, Economist Play, is priced at about $15 a month, roughly $10 below the publisher’s full-access digital offering. It combines long-form video from The Economist Insider, paywalled podcasts, daily audio briefings, short-form video, subscriber-only newsletters and games into a single standalone tier.

Nada Arnot, The Economist’s executive vice-president of marketing, told Digiday that the strategy is intended to broaden the publication’s appeal beyond its traditional readership. “Our ongoing effort is to expand our audience base into a more gender balanced audience that does skew younger,” she said. “Audio and video journalism is increasingly more important for us.”

The Economist Insider, which launched in October, sits at the centre of the push. The premium video product gives subscribers access to extended conversations with editors and guests, as well as debates drawn from the newsroom’s policy coverage. The company says the format has already delivered strong engagement, with 75% of subscribers having interacted with Insider content.

That emphasis on faces and voices is notable for a title long defined by anonymity. The Economist has no bylines, a convention that has helped shape its brand for decades. Liv Moloney, its head of video, said the goal is not to create celebrity presenters but to offer a glimpse into how the newsroom works.

She said the video strategy is about “step inside our newsroom”, rather than building a personality-led model around individual reporters. In a world increasingly flooded with AI-generated summaries, she argued that showing the people behind the journalism matters as a form of authenticity.

Economist Play is also being positioned as a mobile-first product, designed primarily for the app but available on the website too. It is rolling out first in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Canada, markets the company says were selected because research suggested stronger demand for audio and video formats there. A broader international expansion is planned for next year.

The new tier folds in Economist Podcast+, the publisher’s earlier audio subscription service, and existing subscribers will be moved to Play without a price increase. The Economist says it has 1.3 million subscribers worldwide.

The launch follows earlier experiments with cheaper, more accessible offerings. In 2022, the company relaunched Economist Espresso, a news briefing app aimed at younger readers and women, with shorter items and a significantly lower price than its main digital subscription. It has also used TikTok to build a video audience: the account now has 1.4 million followers and generated 188 million views over the past year, according to Tubular Labs.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Perhaps we’ve just been puzzles publishers all along

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:39:22 +0000

Data shows games and interactive content drive deeper user loyalty.
Publishers are overestimating the importance of breaking news for app retention.
Investment should focus on habit-forming features to reduce churn and build routines.

I used to bristle when I worked at The Sunday Times and a friend said he had a subscription to the paper version for two reasons – and neither had anything to do with the journalism. First, he was a big fan of the crossword, which he regarded as the best on Fleet Street. Second, he said the broadsheet format made the paper excellent kindling for his wood-burning stove.

A few years later I looked at the data around the Times tablet app, which was famous for the incredibly long time, more than 45 minutes on average, that readers would spend with it every day. Again, this was a chastening experience: it turned out that a large proportion of that time was accounted for by the crossword.

I thought about these stories this week as I read the new Pugpig Media App Report 2026. Drawing on data from more than 440 apps across 140 publishers, among its findings was that games players are among the most committed users of its clients’ news apps, spending an average of 1,000 minutes a month on them.

Audio listeners and video watchers also spend significantly more time than text-only readers. Users who search, save and share content – also behaviours that are adjacent to journalism, rather than the main act – show markedly higher loyalty and return rates than those who just read.

The report puts it plainly: the best-performing apps "are not simply content containers: they are products that create stronger habits and more active reader relationships”.

What makes the finding particularly pointed is the gap it reveals between what users actually do and what publishers believe they do. Ask publishers, as Pugpig did, what content drives engagement in their apps and 30% will tell you it's news and breaking stories. This was the single highest response in the survey. Puzzles and games came in at just 11%.

Yet the behavioural data tells a rather different story. It turns out that the feature keeping a subscriber opening an app at seven every morning might be a word puzzle, not the splash.

Publishers always had a strong suspicion that this was true in print. I recall a redesign of a section I edited which included the crossword on the back page. The editor in chief had one overriding instruction as the process began. “It’s the first law of newspapers,” he said. “Never, ever move the crossword.” I didn’t and the redesign was well received.

Everyone has seen how well puzzles have worked for the New York Times, but now it’s time to acknowledge their impact more broadly. If games players are your most committed users, then games are not a peripheral product feature but a driver of retention. Every subs-based publisher currently agonising over churn might usefully ask how many of their at-risk subscribers have ever completed a puzzle in the app, and what the correlation looks like.

What should publishers do differently? The first step is to stop treating habit-forming features as secondary. If the data shows that games, video, audio and interactive content drive the most committed users, those features belong at the heart of the product, not in a sub-menu. They deserve investment proportionate to their commercial value.

The second is to reconsider how apps are marketed. Most publishers still promote their apps on the strength of their journalism, which is understandable but perhaps incomplete. The commuter who downloads an app because of an exclusive investigation may not stay for the next one; the commuter who builds a morning routine around the daily puzzle probably will.

The third is to close the measurement gap identified by the Pugpig report: many publishers say they still cannot properly track retention by feature or attribute subscription renewals to specific in-app features or behaviours. Until they can, the case for investing in anything beyond news content will always struggle to get past Finance. None of this requires publishers to become games companies. It requires them to be honest about what they have always been: habit businesses that use great journalism as their primary reason for existing, and everything else as prompts for daily return.

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

WSJ adopts cautious AI approach to enhance reader engagement

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:56:55 +0000

The Wall Street Journal emphasizes AI tools that genuinely improve reporting and reader understanding
Focus on supporting journalists with automation for routine and investigative tasks
Vision for personalised storytelling and strengthening audience relationships

The Wall Street Journal is taking a measured approach to artificial intelligence, with its head of digital, Taneth Evans, saying every new tool must prove it genuinely improves journalism or helps readers understand the world more clearly.

Speaking on The Media Copilot podcast, Evans described a newsroom culture that is open to experimentation but unwilling to adopt technology for its own sake. The Journal, she said, is looking for AI that supports reporting, improves workflows and strengthens the reader experience, rather than simply adding novelty.

That cautious stance reflects a broader shift in publishing. As AI tools become more capable, news organisations are under pressure to decide where automation adds value and where editorial judgement must remain firmly human. At the Journal, according to Evans, audience needs come first. The question is not whether a tool is fashionable, but whether it helps journalists do better work and gives readers a more useful product.

She argued that this is already changing day-to-day newsroom operations, particularly in investigative work and routine production tasks. One example is the paper’s use of AI systems for financial and economic news, where structured data can be converted into draft narratives before editors refine the copy to protect accuracy and preserve standards. The aim, according to the company, is to remove repetitive work and free reporters for more ambitious analysis.

Evans has also pointed to a future in which journalism becomes more adaptive. Rather than forcing every reader through the same article format, she sees scope for personalised storytelling shaped by how people prefer to consume information. That does not mean diluting the reporting, she said, but presenting trusted journalism in forms that are more flexible and more engaging.

The Journal’s strategy appears to extend beyond AI itself. Under Evans and editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, the publication has also put greater emphasis on audience relationships, search and social platforms, while moving away from a narrow fixation on page views. Internal projects such as Talent Lab are designed to help reporters reach readers through vertical video and other formats, even when that does not deliver immediate traffic back to the site.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Der Spiegel draws a hard line on AI writing

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:54:48 +0000

Der Spiegel refuses to let AI write or rewrite its articles, citing responsibility and trust.
Industry faces tension between efficiency and accountability in adopting AI tools.
Growing concerns over accuracy, transparency, and the future role of human journalists.

Whether journalists should use artificial intelligence to write stories has become one of the sharpest fault lines in modern newsrooms. Some editors see AI as a useful tool; others fear a gradual erosion of authorship, accountability and trust.

News organisations are increasingly relying on AI for routine tasks while trying to preserve public confidence in journalism. As publishers draw different boundaries around acceptable use, the question is becoming less about the technology itself than about who is responsible for the finished work.

Der Spiegel has now taken one of the industry's toughest positions. In an essay, editor-in-chief Dirk Kurbjuweit said the magazine will not allow AI to write or rewrite its journalism.

Kurbjuweit said the newsroom had wrestled with how far AI should be allowed to assist reporters and whether machine-generated passages were acceptable if a story remained substantially human-made. His conclusion was that journalists should not hand over the act of writing to a machine.

The broader concern, he argued, is responsibility. If a story is no longer written by the journalist whose byline appears on it, who owns the work and who carries the blame when it goes wrong?

Some newsroom unions are pressing for guarantees on human oversight, disclosure and job protection. At the same time, some publishers have resisted locking AI commitments into contracts because the technology is evolving so quickly. High-profile AI errors, including fabricated quotations and factual mistakes, have only deepened scepticism. The result is a familiar dilemma: readers increasingly want transparency about AI use, yet disclosure can itself undermine confidence in the finished article.

Der Spiegel's policy places it at the restrictive end of current newsroom practice. Other publishers have taken a more permissive approach. Business Insider, for example, has allowed journalists to use AI to help draft copy, provided the published article remains entirely the reporter's own work, according to reporting on its internal guidance.

Supporters argue that AI can speed up routine work without replacing editorial judgement. Critics counter that once a machine begins shaping a story's language, the boundary becomes difficult to enforce.

The concern extends beyond journalism. The Atlantic recently highlighted a series of writing scandals in which authors blamed AI-generated falsehoods and misattributed quotations on tools such as ChatGPT. The cases have reinforced a broader debate about the difference between using AI as an assistant and allowing it to shape the substance, structure and accuracy of a piece. For journalists, that distinction is especially important because credibility is the core product.

There is also a commercial argument beneath the ethical one. AI may produce cleaner, faster prose, but that does not mean readers will value it more. Human writing, Kurbjuweit argued, offers qualities that are harder to replicate: judgement, personality, temperament and lived experience. The industry is still deciding whether those qualities remain a competitive advantage or become a luxury in an AI-assisted future.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Getty Images signs deal with OpenAI

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:25:45 +0000

Getty Images strikes a multi-year licensing deal with OpenAI
The partnership enhances ChatGPT’s image relevance and trustworthiness
Shares rise as Getty aims to monetise its archive amid AI-driven disruption

Getty Images has struck a multi-year licensing deal with OpenAI that will allow its pictures to appear in ChatGPT’s search and discovery results, in a move that could give the AI chatbot access to a more authoritative pool of visual material.

The partnership is aimed at improving the quality and relevance of image-rich responses inside ChatGPT, while keeping the arrangement limited to display rather than model training. Getty said OpenAI will not be permitted to use its images to train DALL·E, the company’s image-generation system.

The agreement comes at a sensitive moment for the stock image industry, which has been under mounting pressure from generative AI tools capable of producing pictures on demand. Getty, whose archive runs to hundreds of millions of images, has been trying to protect the value of its catalogue while finding new ways to monetise it in an AI-driven market.

Craig Peters, Getty Images’ chief executive, said licensed content makes AI search and discovery more useful and trustworthy, arguing that original and reliable imagery remains essential in the digital age.

Investors appeared to welcome the deal, with Getty’s shares rising sharply after the announcement. The reaction suggested that markets see potential in partnerships that position traditional content owners as suppliers to AI platforms rather than victims of them.

For OpenAI, the arrangement may help make ChatGPT’s results feel more polished and commercially safer, particularly as demand grows for verified imagery in AI applications. For Getty, it offers a route to keep its content embedded in a rapidly changing search landscape without surrendering control of its archive.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Local newspapers file lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:24:59 +0000

Complaint alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft used nearly 400 newspapers' reporting without permission
Case marks the largest coordinated legal action by local news publishers on AI training issues
Suit aims to protect local journalism and challenge the use of copyrighted material in AI development

A coalition of local newspaper publishers has filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the technology groups of copying copyrighted reporting from nearly 400 newspapers to help train and operate commercial AI products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, without permission or payment.

According to the complaint, the companies used years of original local news coverage to build systems that now generate substantial commercial value, while the publishers say the outlets that produced the reporting have been left to shoulder the costs. The case also alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying copyright notices, bylines and other rights information were removed from publishers’ work.

Platkin LLP, the New Jersey firm representing the newspaper coalition, said the suit is intended to protect local journalism at a time of severe economic strain for the industry. Matthew J Platkin, the former New Jersey attorney general who founded the firm earlier this year, said local newspapers are central to their communities and argued that the case is aimed at ensuring publishers receive meaningful protection in the AI era.

The publishers say the dispute is part of a much broader fight over who controls the raw material used to train large language models. In a 2026 interview reported by Axios, The New York Times chief executive Meredith Kopit Levien said the company was confident in its legal position in separate cases against OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, and framed the lawsuits as essential to preserving sustainable business models for quality journalism.

The new case adds to a growing wave of litigation from news organisations. Earlier lawsuits by The New York Times and by a group of eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital have already put the issue of AI training and copyright before US courts. A separate complaint from MediaNews Group-owned titles also added to the pressure on the two technology companies.

The latest filing is notable for its scale. The publishers say it is the largest coordinated action so far by local and regional newspapers over the use of their reporting in AI training. They argue that their journalists cover city councils, courts, schools, public safety and other civic institutions that AI systems cannot replicate, and that allowing such work to be commercialised without compensation would further weaken local newsrooms.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman has previously told the British House of Lords that it would be "impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials", a remark the publishers cite as evidence that the companies knew precisely what kinds of material were being used.

The lawsuit seeks to hold OpenAI and Microsoft responsible for what the publishers describe as ongoing copyright violations, while also testing the legal limits of how far AI companies may go in using published journalism to train their products.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Forbes amplifies its creator-led push

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:23:06 +0000

Forbes launches Forbes Creator to leverage social media personalities
New platform combines journalistic content with creator autonomy
Aims to expand reach, diversify content, and develop commercial opportunities

Forbes is deepening its push into creator-led distribution, using social media personalities and specialist voices to widen its reach beyond its own platforms and draw in younger audiences who increasingly consume news and entertainment through creator feeds rather than legacy publisher channels.

The initiative, called Forbes Creator, was unveiled this month as a social-first network built around video, podcasts and live experiences. Forbes says the project is intended to combine its journalistic brand with creators who already command loyal audiences on TikTok, Instagram and other platforms.

The first group includes venture capitalist and former TikTok figure Griffin Johnson, bestselling author Erin McGoff, comedian Joe Fenti, Emmy-nominated creator Shira Lazar, Workhap founder Sho Dewan and Jenny Stojkovic. Dewan has already launched a Forbes Creator podcast, The Work Hotline, signalling that the programme will extend beyond short-form social clips into longer-form formats.

Chloe Moore, vice-president at Forbes, said the company was offering creators a range of options that could support their own businesses as well as the publisher’s. She pointed to production support, access to Forbes events and the creation of new intellectual property as part of the pitch.

The model marks a departure from traditional contributor schemes. Forbes is not asking creators to sit in newsroom meetings or report outside their areas of expertise; instead, it is giving them editorial guidance while allowing them considerable autonomy over what they make.

Tim Pierson, head of video at Forbes, said the company brought its off-platform content operations together under a dedicated creator-focused team earlier this year, underscoring how central the strategy has become internally.

The move reflects a wider industry shift as publishers grapple with weaker search traffic and more unpredictable social referrals. They have increasingly turned to creators as a way to maintain relevance with younger consumers, while also tapping established communities that can be difficult to reach through conventional publishing channels.

Forbes’ own social footprint gives some indication of the scale of the opportunity. Its TikTok account has about 593,000 followers, while some of its creator partners reach audiences counted in the millions. Moore said that “the audience swap is really important” to broadening off-platform growth.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Lack of trust is our biggest issue

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:15:16 +0000

Social media and video now the primary news sources globally
Trust in news drops to a historic low of 37%, with Americans trusting only 25%
News organisations face the challenge of rebuilding trust amidst AI content proliferation

Forget the World Cup, for news nerds this week has brought unbridled excitement – and the need for a few hydration breaks, no doubt – after the publication of the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026.

The headlines were all about social media and video (54%) overtaking traditional news sites (51%) as the source of news for a majority of people worldwide. It’s a landmark moment, of course, but something that many will have seen coming for a few years now if they’ve been reading the annual reports and watching the world around them.

Something that is not a crossover point but one I want to highlight is the ever-decreasing trust in news that the survey reveals. It’s down to its lowest point ever at 37%. Think about it for a second: less than four out of 10 people worldwide trust the news we are giving them. Obviously, in some countries it’s better, but in others it’s much worse. In America only 25% trust the news.

These are figures for users’ opinion of news generally. If anything it’s even worse when you ask people about the news they use themselves. By this measure, only 44% trust it. Some 22% say they don’t trust their own choice of news, which is odd in itself. Why would you read, watch or listen to a news source you didn’t trust?

Either way, this is a crisis that needs addressing right away. Many news organisations have consoled themselves that in a world of AI-produced content they will stand out because people will know they can believe what they’re reading, watching or listening as it has come from an established news brand. They will take comfort, the argument goes, in knowing that it has been verified by human journalists and editors. But that won’t be the case if readers decide they don’t trust our brands – and, at the moment, more don’t than do.

The great danger is that users decide that they don’t see an appreciable difference between AI-produced and human-produced content. Especially when the former becomes much more reliable, as it undoubtedly will. News organisations have to show they are demonstrably different and more trustworthy.

Maybe news is suffering from the general decline in trust in institutions, but we have to try to do something about it, right?

I have an inkling that an answer comes in one of the articles that accompanies the main Reuters report. It was by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, former head of the Reuters Institute and now a professor at Copenhagen University. He wrote about how audiences view the impartiality of news sources.

In his piece is a nugget which should give us pause. While 45% of people say they prefer getting their news from a source that does not have a particular point of view, the 22% who prefer an angle are, bluntly, our super users. They access news many times daily, they are more likely to pay for online news, they share and comment more than others and are more likely to say they are very interested in news and politics.

Naturally, news organisations want to be responsive to their readers and the super users described above are pretty clear in what they want. But that means we leave the near-majority, who prefer impartial news, feeling frustrated and understandably feeling the news is less than trustworthy.

It will, I imagine, be very difficult for avowedly partial news organisations to change tack towards impartiality. Fox News isn’t going to move towards the centre; equally, nor is The Guardian. But for news start-ups or organisations that are more centrist to start with, there could be an opportunity here.

Having had some conversations, I know that some executives fear that being impartial might feel bland and be difficult to sell. But I don’t think that’s an insuperable challenge, especially when there is clearly a market out there waiting to be served. And the knock-on effect might be the increase in trust for news that we, and society, desperately need.

I feel like a broken record on this, but it is also not something that can be put off. Trust in news will not recover on its own. We need to try things – for example, showing our working, explaining our standards, increased communication with users more generally, telling them what we don’t know – and try them now.

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Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at info@hbmadvisory.com

Lexington dispute highlights divide over AI's role in local journalism

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:51:58 +0000

A debate in Lexington underscores tensions between traditional reporting and AI-assisted news
The Kentucky Lantern champions human-made journalism, while Lexington Times utilises AI for coverage
The dispute reflects broader challenges facing shrinking local news ecosystems across the US

A small but telling dispute in Lexington, Kentucky, has opened a wider argument about the future of local journalism, especially the role of artificial intelligence in newsrooms that are trying to survive with fewer staff and thinner budgets.

The spark came when Linda Blackford, editor-in-chief of the Kentucky Lantern, wrote about AI and journalism and stressed that the Lantern’s work is produced by human reporters rather than machine-generated text. In response, Paul Oliva of the Lexington Times defended his publication’s use of AI-assisted summaries and aggregation, while arguing that the service it provides would be difficult to sustain otherwise. The exchange has since become less a feud than a case study in how local news is being remade.

Blackford’s position is straightforward: the Lantern relies on real journalists, publishes without a paywall, and wants its reporting to remain clearly attributable and human-made. The Lantern’s own about page says it is an independent, non-partisan, free news service based in Frankfort, focused on how state decisions affect Kentuckians, and it encourages republication with attribution and a link. That model is designed to spread reporting as widely as possible while preserving the labour behind it.

Oliva, by contrast, has described the Times as a kind of civic utility built for a market that can no longer support the news infrastructure it once had. He says the publication draws on public records, meeting transcripts, press releases and other source documents, then turns them into machine-readable summaries with disclosure and source links. In his telling, the process is not pretending to replace reporters but attempting to fill gaps left by the collapse of local coverage.

Lexington, like many American cities, has seen its traditional news ecosystem shrink dramatically. The old newspaper model has thinned, weeklies have disappeared and television stations cannot cover every meeting or every issue. In that environment, the question is not simply whether AI is desirable. It is whether communities are better served by imperfect automated coverage than by no coverage at all.

The Lexington Times has also republished Kentucky Lantern material with attribution, a reflection of the Lantern’s own encouragement that others reuse its journalism responsibly.

The Lexington argument is unlikely to be the last of its kind. Globally, news organisations are testing hybrid systems, using AI to summarise routine material while relying on journalists for original reporting. The controversy in Kentucky is therefore less an outlier than a preview of how local journalism may be forced to choose between purist standards and practical survival.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Bonnier News to take majority stake in Business Post Group

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:49:30 +0000

Bonnier News poised to become majority owner of Irish media group after partnership expansion
Deal under review by regulators, with new leadership and board structure upcoming
Business Post Group cites significant financial recovery and growth prospects

Swedish publisher Bonnier News is set to become the majority owner of Business Post Group, in a deal that will leave founder Enda O’Coineen with a significant minority stake through his Kilcullen Family Office.

The transaction marks a further step in a relationship that began in 2023, when Bonnier took a minority equity position in the Irish company. It still requires approval from the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and from Media Minister Patrick O’Donovan, as is standard for media ownership changes.

Business Post Group said the move would strengthen a long-standing partnership and underline confidence in the company’s growth prospects. The change also comes as Mark Beard joins as chief executive, with a new board structure expected to reflect the revised shareholder balance.

O’Coineen bought the Sunday Business Post from Key Capital in 2018 and has since expanded the business into a broader media and professional services group. Alongside the newspaper business, the group now includes the market research firm Red C and the events business iQuest. Last year, it also agreed with University College Cork to acquire the Irish Management Institute, adding education and training to its portfolio.

The company said it has grown five-fold since O’Coineen acquired Post Publications Ltd and formed the wider Business Post Group in 2018, when it reported revenues of €7.5 million and was loss-making. The group now describes itself as a profitable €40 million business.

O’Coineen said Bonnier had been an “outstanding partner” and said he was proud of what had been achieved over the past decade. He said he looked forward to continuing to support the group as a long-term shareholder.

Anders Eriksson, chief executive of Bonnier News, said the Irish business had established itself as an innovative and diversified media and professional services group. He said Bonnier was keen to deepen the partnership and help drive the next phase of growth by drawing on experience from the 14 European markets in which it operates.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Independent Media's revenue grows 15% with AI and creator content

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:48:06 +0000

AI now accounts for 10% of revenue, with projections of over 60% growth in AI and Studio divisions
The company expands in North America and integrates international brands, reaching half of the UK audience
New strategic investments and creator-led content fuel sustained growth amid a strong digital advertising market

Independent Media has reported a strong first half to its financial year, saying artificial intelligence now accounts for 10% of total revenue as the publisher deepens its push into automation, creator-led video and podcasts, and overseas growth.

The UK-based group said revenue from both its AI activity and its Studio division is expected to rise by more than 60% year on year. Together with ecommerce and US expansion, those four growth pillars now make up more than 60% of the company’s turnover, according to the business.

The results come ahead of a new strategic investment programme designed to speed up the company’s transformation. They also arrive as John Paton prepares to step down as chairman on 30 September after seven years in the role, with Christian Broughton continuing as chief executive.

Under the pair’s leadership, Independent Media says it has doubled revenue and delivered a prolonged run of growth. The company recorded £53.2m in revenue in its latest full-year accounts for 2024, up £7.1m, or 15%, with operating profit of £3.2m. It says that 2025 figures, which will be published shortly, show further increases, and that it has now posted 10 consecutive years of growth and profit since The Independent ended print production.

The company has also broadened its footprint in North America. Earlier this month, it appointed Chris Anthony as president, North America, to lead the regional business and report to Broughton as the group looks to accelerate revenue there. In the UK, Independent Media struck an agreement in March to take over the digital operations of The Standard, extending its reach further.

The publisher has spent the past year building out a multi-brand digital network. A landmark 2024 deal brought BuzzFeed, Tasty and HuffPost into its stable of UK brands, creating what the company describes as an audience reaching around half of British consumers, with average monthly global reach of 650 million users and 1.1 billion content views across its platforms.

Independent Studio, launched only last year, has become an important part of that strategy. The company points to creator-led formats such as In The Room, which entered the UK current affairs podcast top 10 after 12 episodes, and ACFC, a football analysis YouTube channel with more than 200,000 subscribers. Another recent launch, Bulletin, an AI-assisted news summary product, has also helped drive the contribution from AI.

Source: Noah Wire Services

The foggy future of AI news

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:52:27 +0000

Expert warns news industry is still writing as if it’s 1957
Discussions highlight challenges of mobile storytelling and atomisation of news
Questions remain about verification, funding, and brands in an AI-driven news future

“We are still writing like it’s 1957” was the blunt assessment of Mario Garcia, speaking earlier this month at WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille.

You might dismiss this as hyperbole from some, but Garcia, the Columbia University journalism school legend, is in a better position than most to judge. At 79 years old, he was one of the few delegates – perhaps he was the only one – who could actually remember 1957.

He got me thinking about what journalism will look like in 2057, or – given the pace of change we are experiencing – rather earlier, and how few pointers we actually have.

First, though, Garcia’s thesis. He said he had lived through six journalistic revolutions: hot type to cold type; typewriters to computers; black and white to colour; the internet; and now the mobile revolution and AI. Of the present, concurrent ones he said: “The other revolutions never affected how you write a story.”

He went into a long explanation of how newsrooms, with a few honourable exceptions, were failing to meet this challenge. Among other things, he lamented how “everything is produced horizontally, but consumed vertically” on mobile screens. And the various different elements that we can now use alongside text – video, audio, infographics etc – are treated as add-ons rather than an integral, indivisible part of the creative process.

“When I walk into a newspaper and they say, ‘You’ll meet the multimedia team at 2pm”, I think the elephant in the room is a big print elephant,” said Garcia. His point was that we have not truly assimilated the requirements of mobile storytelling and still treat it as something separate from the main form of journalism: writing articles.

This came to mind as speaker after speaker spoke about the atomisation of news and the death of the article. “The future of journalism is not the article, but everything around it,” said Ezra Eeman, who leads WAN-IFRA’s AI in Media initiative. He meant provenance, context and rights, but either way I see little sign of this becoming a reality any time soon.

I’m not saying that it won’t – and you could argue that video is becoming that form as I type this newsletter – but very few have truly broken away from the article.

Sannuta Raghu, from Scroll in India, spoke in Marseille about how they are trying to become a “trusted workspace” for people interested in studying South Asia in depth. The workspace for each subject covered by Scroll comprises different layers of content: Mini – which is headlines, key facts, key players; Core – a traditional article; and Deep – a curated dossier of collected materials and which explains what Scroll does and does not know about a topic. Note that Core is an article.

I thought back to Circa, the ill-fated Silicon Valley atomised news app of 15 years ago. Ultimately, the atoms of news it published would roll up into an article. We seem hardwired to see completion in this form of journalism.

I say this not as criticism but more because I find it really difficult to imagine how an atomised world of news will work in practice, rather than theory. I get that reporters will file snippets of text, or video, or audio, or photographs, or data and that these could be assembled using AI-driven models to provide individualised news experiences.

But how will this content be verified? How will it be paid for – surely a publishers would want to charge more for a 50-word snippet than the fully immersive 10-minute video, graphics and audio version? Will there be a general release version that anyone can access and goes into the historical record? Will there be recognisable news brands at all, or will they all effectively be wire services feeding into the AI giants that own the user relationship?

There are some stirrings on these questions. Jessica Davis of USA Today spoke in Marseille about agentic AI “needs a new model for oversight”. She and her team are working to “protect trust without capping AI-enabled value” by automating evaluations of content produced using AI. In short, remaking the human in the loop in bot form. Others are working on this too.

Eeman said he “wouldn’t disown the idea” of agentic subscriptions, where you’d buy agentic access to the content of, say, the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times, or The Guardian.

At the Signals at Scale workshop in Copenhagen the week before, there was a lot of focus on the need for a payment layer for atomised content, but no answers as yet.

I guess I’m just being impatient for wanting to “see” this future landscape and that it’ll emerge over time. Until then we’re in the world of the vague. Near the end of his talk, Garcia said of the AI revolution that “we need to put the scent of humans into stories”. I smiled at the time but on reflection am not any the wiser about what that really means. As Jane Barrett from Reuters said, the road to our AI future is a little foggy at present.

My closing thought is a simple one: the news industry shouldn’t leave the navigation of that road to AI giants who might not have our best interests at heart.

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Social media and video platforms now dominate news consumption, says Reuters report

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:23:30 +0000

Over half of global news consumers now turn to social media and video networks, surpassing traditional news websites
Video consumption on platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram surges, while trust in news declines
Artificial intelligence begins transforming news engagement, especially among younger audiences

Social media and video networks have surpassed traditional news websites and apps as the primary way people consume news globally, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, which was published this week.

The annual report, based on surveys across 48 markets, paints a picture of a news ecosystem facing escalating volatility and a profound transformation in audience behaviour. For the first time in the report's 15-year history, 54% of global respondents reported accessing online news via social media and video platforms, pulling ahead of the 51% who go directly to news organisations' "owned and operated" platforms.

"The data this year point to greater volatility, reflecting this heightened sense of uncertainty," writes Jim Egan, the report’s lead author, noting that audiences are reacting with anxiety, disengagement and cynicism to successive waves of political, economic and technological turbulence.

A central theme of the 2026 findings is the rapid "platformisation" of news. Online video consumption is surging, with 77% of people globally watching news videos each week. Much of this growth is occurring on third-party, video-led networks like YouTube, Instagram and notably TikTok, which is now used by 20% of respondents globally for news. Meanwhile, the consumption of video on mainstream news outlets' own sites has dropped by five percentage points.

Independent creators and influencers are at the forefront of this video revolution. Roughly 27% of global respondents now get some of their news from individual creators. While audiences find these influencers more relatable and entertaining than traditional journalists, they also rate them as less trustworthy and less impartial.

Artificial intelligence is also carving out a new frontier in how the public digests current events. Globally, 10% of people now use AI chatbots to get their news, up from 7% last year. The adoption is particularly strong among younger demographics, with 16% of under-35s utilising AI tools to ask follow-up questions and seek deeper explanations of complex stories.

However, these technological shifts come at a steep cost to traditional metrics of industry health. Overall interest in news has plummeted, falling 13 percentage points since 2021. A full quarter of all respondents are now classified as "casual or passive" consumers who check the news just once a week.

Simultaneously, trust in the news has hit a record low. Trust dropped in 29 of the 48 surveyed markets, dragging the global average down to just 37% – the lowest figure recorded since the Reuters Institute began tracking the metric in 2015. Alongside plummeting trust, concerns regarding misinformation and "fake news" have spiked to 62%.

The financial outlook for legacy outlets also remains challenging. The percentage of people paying for online news remains stagnant at 17% across a tracked basket of 20 countries. As direct traffic to news websites dwindles, converting casual readers into paying subscribers is becoming increasingly difficult, though the report notes a growing trend of audiences financially supporting non-traditional outlets based on shared values.

Despite the grim statistics regarding trust and engagement, the report highlights a resilient demand for core journalistic values. A significant 45% of respondents still prefer news that does not take sides, proving that while the mediums through which people consume information are changing at breakneck speed, the public’s desire for objective, impartial reporting remains strong.

Google to contest German court ruling on AI search summaries

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:43:11 +0000

German court rules AI Overviews are Google’s own content, risking liability
Google argues the AI summaries are accurate but admits occasional errors
Case could set legal precedent on responsibility for AI-generated information

Google is set to challenge a German court ruling that could make it liable for false statements surfaced in its AI Overviews, a decision that may reverberate across the wider artificial intelligence sector.

The Munich court said the AI-generated summaries that appear above standard search results amount to Google’s own content, rather than a neutral display of third-party material. That finding narrows the company’s defence that users should verify the underlying web pages themselves.

The case was brought by two German publishers, who argued that Google’s AI Overviews wrongly associated them with scams and dubious commercial practices. Google said in a statement that the dispute concerned "specific and narrow errors", not the overall way the product presents web content, and added that it disagreed with the ruling and would appeal.

The company has maintained that the vast majority of AI Overviews are accurate, while accepting that, as with other search features, the summaries can occasionally miss context or misread source material. It also said it moves quickly to address breaches of its policies for the feature.

The judgment adds to mounting pressure on Google and other technology groups as they embed generative AI more deeply into search and publishing workflows. News organisations and other content providers have argued that AI summaries can divert traffic, reduce readership and squeeze revenues, while regulators in several markets are examining the competitive and legal consequences of the shift.

Legal observers say the Munich ruling could help define how responsibility is allocated when AI systems generate allegedly defamatory or misleading claims. For Google, the case is likely to become a test of how far courts are willing to treat AI-produced search responses as company-authored material rather than automated assistance.

Source: Noah Wire Services

UK to ban social media for under-16s

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:41:49 +0000

UK government aims to restrict social media access for under-16s by spring 2027
Moves to curb risky features like livestreaming and stranger contact
Experts highlight challenges of enforcement and broader public health strategies

The UK government has confirmed plans to bar social media platforms from offering services to under-16s, in a move ministers say is designed to give children more protection from harmful content and excessive screen time.

According to the announcement, the restrictions will apply to "user-to-user platforms" that are built around social interaction and algorithmic feeds. In practice, that brings services such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X into scope, while messaging apps including WhatsApp and Signal are excluded.

The government also wants to curb specific features it sees as especially risky, including livestreaming and direct contact between children and strangers. Those limits would extend beyond traditional social networks to a wider set of online services, including gaming platforms.

Ministers say the system will rely on "more highly effective age assurance" measures, which they argue should make it harder for younger users to get round the rules than has been the case in Australia. The regulations are expected to take effect in spring 2027.

Prime minister Keir Starmer has framed the policy as part of a broader effort to tackle the effects of online platforms on children, describing it as a way to protect their wellbeing and restore a sense of childhood. The move follows a consultation launched by ministers in January, after mounting concern over the impact of social media on young people’s health and behaviour.

The announcement adds the UK to a growing number of countries trying to force stronger age checks and tighter controls on children’s online access. But it also raises familiar questions about enforcement, the breadth of the definition used to capture platforms, and whether age-assurance technology can work reliably at scale.

Experts have argued that restrictions alone are unlikely to be enough. Dr Amrit Kaur Purba of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said the ban should be seen as one part of a wider public-health approach to protecting children online.

For the music industry and other sectors that rely heavily on social platforms to reach younger audiences, the implications could be significant. The government’s definition is broad enough to sweep in major discovery and video-sharing services, while its planned limits on livestreaming and stranger messaging could further change how those services operate for under-16s.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Bloomberg and Cision strike content partnership

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:06:58 +0000

Bloomberg journalism now accessible directly within CisionOne platform for corporate users
Aims to streamline news monitoring and response strategies for communications teams
Reflects a trend towards seamless integration of media content and analytics for enterprise agility

Bloomberg Media has partnered with Cision to make Bloomberg's journalism available within CisionOne, the media intelligence platform used by corporate communications teams.

The deal highlights a broader effort by publishers and intelligence providers to integrate reporting directly into professional workflows, reducing the gap between content consumption and decision-making for enterprise users.

Under the arrangement, eligible Bloomberg.com group subscribers will be able to read, monitor and engage with Bloomberg coverage without leaving CisionOne. The companies said the partnership is designed to give communications teams easier access to business and financial reporting as they track developments and shape responses.

Nick Pimm, managing director of enterprise sales at Bloomberg Media, said the partnership would bring Bloomberg's journalism into the environment where executives are making decisions and responding to news.

Stuart Clark, senior vice-president of content strategy and partnerships at Cision, said trusted journalism remains central to helping communications teams understand stories, issues and market shifts affecting their organisations.

Bloomberg Media said its reporting is produced by a global newsroom. Cision said its products are used by more than 75,000 companies and organisations, including most Fortune 500 firms.

Source: Noah Wire Services

All's well that ends well

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:27:44 +0000

Rainer Esser asserts AI will enhance journalism's value by emphasising human connection
Calls for news organisations to recognise their worth and partner confidently with tech giants
Personal storytelling highlights irreplaceable human element in investigative journalism

If you’re invited to speak at a conference, you really don’t want a slot at the end of the day when delegates’ energy has dropped and the darkness of the auditorium becomes soporific. Even worse is to be the last speaker in the last session on the last day.

At WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Marseille this week that poisoned chalice fell to Rainer Esser, former managing director of Die Zeit. But undeterred, he looked at the hardy souls before him in the main auditorium – both of us ;) – and delivered a bravura performance.

Indeed, I’d say his speech was both a literal and metaphorical argument for how we should approach the future of journalism in the age of AI. He was bold, without being overconfident, positive, but also realistic, and very human, in a way no bot could be.

He was bold when saying that AI will not kill journalism but make it more valuable than ever. Every wave of journalism has seen journalism “shed its skin” and find new ways to show its value, he argued. The reason is that “at its core it’s about human connection”. That’s no different in a world of AI because “when you automate the ordinary, you make the extraordinary more valuable”.

Esser was uncompromising in saying that journalistic organisations should know their worth and demand it be recognised. “We should not approach the Silicon Valley giants as beggars – we should walk in with our heads held high. Their highways are empty without our vehicles. They have the reach, but we have the souls.”

He was realistic about what the relationship between the AI platforms and publishers will look like. “The future does not belong to the tech platforms alone, nor to isolated publishers but to both acting together,” he said, noting that both will prosper if together they combine reach and accountability. “Truth is the only currency that cannot be algorithmically produced: an algorithm cannot report; it knows probability but not the truth.”

Esser also used a personal tale to describe how AI is being used by newsrooms to produce new and important journalism. Die Zeit recently released a tool whose headline tells you everything you need to know: “Use our tool to learn about your family’s Nazi party history.”

Esser paused briefly to compose himself before explaining how he had researched his grandfathers. One, he said, was an “early adopter” of Nazism and had joined the party in 1932 before Hitler came to power and died a few years later in a Russian camp. The other was a staunch Catholic who resisted the Nazis. “So I’m 50% okay,” he said.

Huge credit to Esser for exposing himself like that, but it was also a tale that no algorithm could tell, and certainly not in the disarming way that Esser told it.

In questions afterwards, Esser was asked if we, as an industry, are talking about AI too much. He replied: “I think we are talking about it adequately. When digitisation started in about 1996 people said: ‘Maybe the internet will go away.’ At Die Zeit we only got into it in 2008. If we wait 12 years this time, we’ll be gone.”

Behavioural economists will tell you that you only really remember the emotional peak and the end of a speech, an article or an event. Esser managed to combine both for the congress in Marseille.

There were plenty of thought-provoking presentations to which I’ll return in the coming weeks, but I felt Esser captured the emerging spirit of self-confidence and not a little defiance in the face of AI that was one of the hallmarks of the event. For that, it was definitely worth staying until the very end.

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NTY video chief says news audiences no longer fit neat categories

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:54:14 +0000

The Times adopts a specialised, multi-team approach to video content production
Video is now a distinct editorial discipline, not just repurposed print stories
Distribution strategies evolve with dedicated platforms like the new 'Watch' tab

At WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Marseille, Solana Pyne, video director at The New York Times, argued that the traditional distinction between readers, listeners and viewers no longer reflects how audiences consume news.

The shift is reshaping how newsrooms organise themselves. As audiences move more fluidly between text, audio and video, publishers are increasingly treating video not as a way to support written journalism but as a reporting discipline in its own right.

Pyne said audience behaviour is becoming more mixed across formats. While last year's Reuters Institute Digital News Report suggests reading remains the preferred way for many people to follow the news, weekly news-video consumption in the US has risen sharply in recent years, reaching around three-quarters of adults.

For The Times, that trend has reinforced a simple conclusion: video requires its own editorial logic. That approach has been developing for years. The Times had already begun moving away from treating video as a way to recycle print stories. Instead, it started building video journalism around the strengths of the medium itself.

Pyne said that principle still guides the newsroom. Not every article should become a video, she argued, and straightforward filmed summaries of written stories rarely succeed. The objective is to create journalism that gives audiences a reason to watch.

To support that goal, The Times has built a more specialised video operation. A visual investigations team combines satellite imagery, witness footage and other evidence to reconstruct complex events. Field reporters continue to produce traditional on-the-ground video journalism, while a separate reporter-video desk adapts newsroom reporting into video formats when the medium can add something distinctive.

Breaking news is handled by a dedicated team that uses witness footage, agency material and original reporting to produce rapid updates and explainers. More recently, the company has added a shows division focused on interview-led programming that has grown out of its audio and video podcast work. Programmes such as "The Interview" and "Popcast" are designed to have their own identity while remaining rooted in Times journalism.

Pyne highlighted the paper’s coverage of a January 2026 shooting in Minneapolis as an example of how those teams work together. Reporters and visual investigators quickly assembled witness footage and official accounts, comparing them with the newsroom’s own reporting. Within hours, The Times had published initial context around the incident, followed by a more detailed visual reconstruction the next day.

As the story evolved, other reporting strands were added. When White House correspondents conducted a scheduled interview with President Donald Trump later that day, they questioned him about the shooting. Although video recording was not permitted, audio and photographs from the meeting were later incorporated into another video alongside an interview with one of the reporters.

A Minneapolis-based photographer also gathered additional footage and reporting from near the scene. Meanwhile, a field team deployed to a local school recorded federal agents arriving to close the site, leading to confrontations with teachers and students. Pyne said those reports offered distinctive perspectives on a fast-moving story and attracted millions of viewers.

Distribution, she argued, is now as important as production. The Times publishes video both on its own platforms and across third-party services, using off-platform distribution to reach audiences who may not actively seek out news but encounter it in video-first environments.

At the same time, the company has been rethinking how video is presented within its own products. Its new Watch tab offers a dedicated vertical-video experience inside the Times app. Rather than focusing on a single topic, the feed is curated to provide a broad mix of reporting, with editors deciding the balance and order of content.

For Pyne, the lesson is that video can no longer be treated as an extension of the written report. As audience habits evolve, publishers need dedicated reporting structures, editorial approaches and distribution strategies designed specifically for visual journalism.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Goalhanger tops Sunday Times 100 list of fast-growing companies

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:51:27 +0000

Goalhanger becomes Britain’s fastest-growing private company with £37.9 million sales in 2025
Founded by Gary Lineker and former TV producers, it has a strong following in sports, politics, and history
Secures investment from The Chernin Group amid a surge of consumer brands on the list

Gary Lineker’s move from television punditry into podcasting has helped turn Goalhanger into Britain’s fastest-growing private company, according to the latest Sunday Times 100 ranking.

Research for the annual list shows the London-based production business posted sales of £37.9 million in 2025, with average annual growth of roughly 321 per cent over the past three years. That was enough to put it top of the table ahead of a wide field of consumer and service businesses.

Founded by Lineker with former television producers Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport, Goalhanger has built a sizeable audience around long-form sports, politics and history programming. Its best-known titles include The Rest Is History, The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is Football, the last of which is presented by Lineker alongside Micah Richards and Alan Shearer.

The company’s rise comes after Lineker stepped down as presenter of Match of the Day last year, ending a 26-year run at the BBC following controversy over his social media commentary. He has since said he is not competing with the corporation, arguing instead that his World Cup coverage will sit alongside the BBC’s live broadcasts.

Goalhanger’s momentum has also attracted outside backing. In January, the business secured investment from The Chernin Group, the media company led by Peter Chernin, whose credits include films such as Planet of the Apes and The Greatest Showman.

The Sunday Times list also underlined the strength of Britain’s consumer-facing businesses. Health and wellbeing brands Ancient + Brave and Free Soul were both placed in the top 10, each posting average annual sales growth of more than 200 per cent, while other names in the ranking included medical cannabis clinic Mamedica, non-alcoholic drinks maker Mother Root and meal delivery service Simmer Eats.

Second in the list was Lucky Egg, a London boardgame and party-game producer that recorded growth of almost 300 per cent. The ranking also showed a record proportion of companies with female founders, co-founders or chief executives.

Jon Yeomans, business editor of The Sunday Times, said consumer brands had become the dominant theme of the list over the past five years, with food, drink, fashion and beauty companies accounting for nearly half of the entrants. He added that several firms which had appeared before, including Huel and Applied Nutrition, had gone on to expand further through stock market listings or acquisitions by larger international groups.

Source: Noah Wire Services

UK competition watchdog gives publishers control over AI use in Google search

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:47:02 +0000

CMA mandates tools for publishers to restrict AI training on their content
Clearer attribution and control options for AI-generated search results
Google given nine months to comply with new regulations

Britain’s competition watchdog has ordered Google to give publishers greater control over how their material is used in the company’s AI-powered search products, in a move it described as a world first.

The Competition and Markets Authority said publishers will have to be given practical tools to stop their content being used to support Google’s generative AI services, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, for users in the UK. It also wants clearer linking and attribution in AI-generated search results, alongside the option for publishers to exclude their material from being used to train AI models.

The intervention is part of a broader push by the regulator to curb Google’s influence in the UK search market after designating the company as strategically important in online search and search advertising. The CMA said the new rules are intended to improve publishers’ bargaining position when negotiating commercial deals with Google.

The watchdog had already signalled the direction of travel earlier this year, when it published draft proposals after concluding that some news publishers had seen traffic fall following the rollout of AI Overviews, which place summary answers above traditional search links and can reduce visits to original articles.

Google said it was working with regulators, including the CMA, and noted that it had begun testing a new control allowing website owners to manage how their links and content appear in generative AI search features.

CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said the measures were designed to deliver fairer treatment, more transparency and real choice for businesses and consumers, while helping UK users better understand the information they are shown.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Meta attacks Australia's proposed news levy

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:45:32 +0000

Meta has criticised Australia’s plan to make large digital platforms contribute financially to news organisations, arguing the proposal would entrench publisher dependence on technology companies rather than help create sustainable media businesses.

The dispute highlights a broader debate over how governments should support journalism in the digital age. While Australia argues platforms should help fund news production, Meta says forcing technology companies to subsidise publishers risks delaying the industry’s adaptation to changing consumer habits and advertising markets.

In a submission to the government, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp described the proposed News Bargaining Incentive as "grossly unfair". The company argued that guaranteeing revenue from platforms would shield publishers from competitive pressures at a time when they need to develop more durable business models.

Meta also called the proposal "poorly designed" and "economically incoherent", claiming it would breach Australia’s obligations under its free trade agreement with the United States. A healthy media sector cannot be built through taxes imposed on foreign companies, the company argued, particularly when the levy is not linked to any clear exchange of value.

Under the Labor government’s proposal, social media and search companies would face a 2.25% charge on Australian revenue unless they enter commercial agreements with local publishers. Companies that strike sufficient deals could reduce the rate to an effective 1.5%, while funds raised through the scheme would be distributed according to the number of journalists employed by participating outlets.

The measure is primarily aimed at Meta, Google and TikTok owner ByteDance. However, it would not apply to artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, despite concerns from publishers that AI products are also diverting traffic away from news websites.

The scheme is intended to replace Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, which led to a series of commercial agreements between publishers and platforms but was later undermined when Meta removed news content from Facebook.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the policy in April, saying the government was committed to supporting Australian journalism and local reporting. Officials estimate the measure could generate between A$200 million and A$250 million annually for domestic media organisations.

Australia’s news industry has faced years of financial pressure as advertising revenues have shifted from print publications to digital platforms. According to the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, more than 19,500 journalism jobs have been lost since 2008, illustrating the scale of the challenge the government is attempting to address.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Guardian’s shift to global reader-funded model boosts revenue and resilience

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:43:38 +0000

The Guardian’s international income from outside the UK exceeds 80% for the first time in a decade.
Digital reader contributions rose to £125m in the year ending March 2026, with strong growth in the US market.
Publisher diversifies support channels, maintaining its open-access mission amid evolving media landscape.

The Guardian has seen a sharp rise in reader-funded income and international revenue over the past decade, with editor-in-chief Katharine Viner saying more than 80% of its income from outside the UK is a phenomenon that did not exist 10 years ago.

Speaking at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress last week, Viner said the publisher’s shift towards a more global, digital and reader-supported business has transformed its finances. According to data she cited, digital reader revenue from regular supporters and one-off donors reached £125m in the year to 31 March 2026, up 17% year on year. That compares with £88m in 2023/24 and £107m in 2024/25.

Axios reported last month that The Guardian’s US business generated $81.4m in the year to 31 March 2026, a rise of 25% and its strongest result since the American operation launched 15 years ago. The bulk of that revenue, Axios said, came from digital reader contributions.

Viner described the reader-funded model as one built on participation rather than a simple commercial exchange. She argued that the absence of a hard paywall creates a different relationship with audiences and makes the model more resilient, while acknowledging that only a small fraction of regular readers currently contribute money. The Guardian, she said, is trying to make payment as frictionless as possible for those who prefer a more conventional transaction.

The company has also been broadening the ways in which readers can support its journalism, with payments available for products including the Feast recipe app, the main app, Guardian Weekly and the print newspaper. The Guardian says its mission is to keep the site open to all, which it presents as a public interest choice at a time when news access is increasingly tied to payment.

The Guardian’s own corporate material says its reader-funded strategy, launched in 2016, has helped build a global supporter base of more than 1.1 million people, with reader income now its largest revenue stream. Guardian Media Group says more than half of its income comes directly from readers, underlining how central that model has become to the business.

Viner also pointed to the publication’s international reach, saying readers now contribute from across the globe, including from places such as Nauru, Svalbard, Vatican City and Antarctica. She said the organisation is increasingly thinking beyond text, including video and other formats, and is considering what a Guardian-backed news influencer might look like.

Her comments came as publishers continue to grapple with audience fragmentation and news avoidance. Viner said she does not see evidence in The Guardian’s own data that avoidance is hurting performance, despite survey findings that large shares of people in Britain and the US say they sometimes avoid the news. Instead, she argued, audiences still want trusted information, but in forms that fit the platforms they use.

She said facts alone are not enough to counter misinformation, and that journalism must also offer context, perspective and narrative. In her view, simply presenting evidence is insufficient if audiences are already exposed to competing claims.

Viner also used the conference to echo concerns raised by New York Times chairman AG Sulzberger about artificial intelligence firms and copyright, backing his call for publishers to work together on licensing standards through the SPUR coalition, of which The Guardian is a founding member. She said governments seemed eager to equate AI with growth, but warned that the impact on creative industries should not be overlooked.

Turning to newsroom pressures, Viner said The Guardian has increased spending on legal support and physical protection for staff. She referred to the paper’s High Court victory over actor Noel Clarke last year, saying it had helped investigative reporting in Britain. She also said the risks to journalists in conflict zones, particularly Gaza, had made clear that traditional press protection is no longer enough.

She added that Guardian journalists are no longer expected to post on social media, a change from earlier years when such activity was actively encouraged. In her view, online abuse can shape behaviour and decision-making in ways that undermine reporting.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Pichai acknowledges AI tensions reshaping Google Search

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:34:11 +0000

Pichai discusses Google's organisational overhaul post-ChatGPT
New AI products aim to blur surface distinctions and streamline user experience
Search results face scrutiny over AI-driven bias and publisher impact

Sundar Pichai has offered one of his clearest public accounts yet of how generative AI has forced Google to reorganise internally, rethink Search and confront growing tension with publishers whose businesses depend on referral traffic.

Speaking to Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder podcast in a conversation recorded after Google I/O 2026, the Alphabet chief executive described the period following ChatGPT’s arrival as requiring a wholesale organisational reset rather than a simple product update. Google had the underlying technology, he suggested, but not the structure to move fast enough.

The interview showed Google openly acknowledging several pressures at once: that AI-generated search results can become overly prescriptive, that publishers may face a future with sharply reduced Google traffic, and that public anxiety about AI reflects genuine economic and social disruption rather than a messaging problem.

Pichai pointed to the merger of Google Brain and DeepMind into Google DeepMind as an early attempt to reduce duplication and accelerate deployment across the company. He also highlighted later reorganisations that placed more of Search under Elizabeth Reid, expanded Nick Fox’s responsibilities and reshaped leadership across Labs and Gemini in an effort to create a more direct pipeline from research to products.

He said he now runs weekly AI product reviews himself, underscoring how central the technology has become to Google’s decision-making. The goal, he suggested, is to increase execution speed across the company because responsiveness matters more than any single organisational structure.

That urgency was reflected in the products Google unveiled at I/O 2026. Pichai discussed Gemini Spark, a consumer-facing agent embedded in the Gemini app, and Antigravity, an agentic coding platform for developers. Both, he argued, sit on the same underlying model infrastructure, with Spark extending assistance across services such as Gmail, Docs and Calendar, while Antigravity allows engineers to direct teams of AI agents.

He also suggested Google’s products will increasingly converge. Search, Spark and tools such as Canvas are moving towards a shared model layer, he said, so users no longer need to think about which product is handling a task. The direction of travel is towards an agentic interface where systems perform more work in the background rather than simply returning links.

One of the interview’s sharpest exchanges came when Patel showed Pichai a Google result for “best Chromebook”. The page opened with an AI Overview, followed by paid placements, a Reddit result and a news article offering conflicting recommendations. Pichai conceded the answer was “probably more opinionated than it should be” for that query.

The moment captured a broader tension inside Google Search. AI-generated summaries at the top of results pages are not neutral indexes, and their conclusions can diverge sharply from the sources beneath them. For publishers and marketers, that matters because the AI layer increasingly determines what users see first and whether they click through at all.

The impact is already being felt across publishing. Roger Lynch, chief executive of Condé Nast, has publicly said the company is preparing for a future in which Google referral traffic could effectively disappear after years of disappointing search performance. Pichai did not reject that assessment. Instead, he said publishers understand their own businesses better than he does and stopped short of challenging Lynch’s underlying premise.

He argued, however, that web traffic patterns are becoming more fragmented, with referral sources more diverse than they were a decade ago. He also said users who do click through from Search are returning less quickly, which he framed as evidence of higher-quality engagement. Publishers and independent researchers have widely challenged that claim, arguing that AI summaries reduce the value of the search click itself.

Patel also pressed Pichai on whether users should have stronger rights to opt out of AI training, similar to protections some publishers are seeking for their content. Pichai pointed to Google-Extended, the company’s opt-out mechanism, and said Google remains in discussions with publishers even as legal disputes continue in the UK and elsewhere.

The conversation broadened into a wider discussion about public unease over AI. Pichai rejected the idea that concern can be solved through better communications alone, arguing that anxiety reflects real pressures including job disruption, the expansion of data centres and the speed of technological change. Human beings, he said, are not built to absorb this much change at once.

He cited Google’s SynthID watermarking system and industry commitments on energy and safety as examples of companies attempting to act responsibly, but avoided presenting them as complete solutions. The public, he said, needs a meaningful role in deciding how powerful AI systems are deployed in democratic societies. Pichai also acknowledged the spread of low-quality AI-generated material online. He linked the problem to intense competitive pressure as companies race to release products before standards have stabilised, helping fuel what is now widely described as AI slop.

On artificial general intelligence, Pichai was cautious but direct. He said he and Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis broadly share a definition of AGI as a system capable of performing the full range of cognitive tasks humans can undertake at a comparable level. He declined to predict a timetable, but said the industry increasingly talks in terms of three to five years, while arguing that the trajectory of capability matters more than any precise threshold.

The interview reflected a broader shift in how Google describes its future. Pichai increasingly portrays Search not as a static destination, but as something closer to an agent manager operating across Google’s services. In that context, the consolidation of AI teams, the rise of Gemini and the launch of tools such as Spark and Antigravity all point towards a single goal: building one AI layer across Google’s product stack.

For publishers, advertisers and developers, the implications are significant. Google’s chief executive has now acknowledged that some AI-generated search results are too prescriptive, accepted that publishers may be right to prepare for a near-zero referral future and conceded that public anxiety about AI is rooted in genuine disruption. The transition underway at Google increasingly looks less like a product cycle than a structural shift in how attention, traffic and authority are distributed online.

Source: Noah Wire Services

ABC appoints Reuters executive Simon Robinson as new director of news

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:29:44 +0000

Simon Robinson, currently a Reuters executive, to lead ABC News in September
First external hire for the role in decades amid leadership reshuffle
Broadcaster seeks to rejuvenate its journalistic output amid ongoing transition

Australia's ABC has chosen Reuters executive Simon Robinson as its new director of news and current affairs, ending days of speculation after the broadcaster’s surprise leadership change.

Robinson, currently deputy to Reuters’ editor-in-chief, will take up the post in September. The ABC said he would become its next Director of News and Current Affairs, and described the appointment as the first external hire for the role in decades.

His arrival comes after Justin Stevens resigned abruptly on Wednesday, ending a four-year tenure. The ABC said Stevens stepped down for personal and professional reasons, while managing director Hugh Marks praised his 19 years with the broadcaster and credited him with helping make ABC News the country’s leading digital news provider.

Robinson said the move carried personal significance, noting that he grew up listening to and watching ABC News. He said he believed strongly in fact-based, independent journalism and regarded the public broadcaster as central to reliable reporting for Australians.

Marks used Senate estimates on Thursday to frame the change as part of a wider reset at the broadcaster, saying the departure opened the way for a “refreshed and rejuvenated output” and a new phase for ABC News. He declined to discuss reports that Stevens had been pressured to resign, but said he had held a meeting with Stevens about a “very serious matter” and insisted: “I don’t make threats, senator.”

According to the ABC, Robinson brings extensive experience across reporting, investigations and newsroom leadership. He began his career in Australia at Time Inc in Sydney before moving overseas, where he built a long career with Time and later spent 16 years at Reuters. The ABC said he has led or helped shape a newsroom of about 2,600 journalists across more than 150 countries.

The appointment also underlines the scale of the transition facing the broadcaster. Stevens’ farewell message to staff on Wednesday described ABC News as one of the country’s most scrutinised institutions and said he had worked to strengthen its journalism, improve its culture and adapt to a fast-changing digital environment.

Marks said he wished Stevens well and signalled that Robinson’s appointment would give the ABC an opportunity to look ahead.

Source: Noah Wire Services

AI governance policy evolves on multiple fronts

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:28:01 +0000

CNN sues Perplexity AI over copyright violations
OpenAI publishes governance framework aligned with new regulations
State versus federal fights intensify over AI regulation jurisdiction

Three developments last week underscored how fragmented AI governance has become: CNN sued Perplexity AI over alleged copying of its journalism; OpenAI published a governance framework tied to emerging EU and California rules; and the legal battle over state AI regulation in the US continued to intensify.

The disputes show AI policy evolving on multiple fronts at once. Copyright enforcement, safety disclosure requirements and constitutional fights over state regulation are advancing separately, forcing AI companies to navigate overlapping legal and political risks rather than one coherent regulatory system.

CNN’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, accuses the AI search company of scraping and republishing more than 17,000 news stories, photographs and videos without permission. The broadcaster says Perplexity infringed copyright and misused its trademark by implying a content relationship that did not exist. Perplexity’s response was familiar. “You can't copyright facts,” said Jesse Dwyer, the company’s chief communications officer.

The case arrives amid growing resistance from publishers to AI firms using journalism to power search and answer tools. Perplexity already faces claims from several media groups, including The New York Times, News Corp and Dow Jones, while outlets such as Time, Gannett, Le Monde and Der Spiegel have signed licensing deals instead. The CNN case adds to mounting pressure on AI companies over how they source and commercialise protected material.

OpenAI, meanwhile, moved in a different direction. The company published its Frontier Governance Framework, setting out how its internal safety systems align with the California Transparency in Frontier AI Act and the EU AI Act’s Code of Practice for general-purpose AI.

The framework addresses risks including cyber abuse, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, manipulation and loss of control. OpenAI said it will update the document as regulation evolves.

The publication reflects a broader shift towards pre-emptive disclosure in frontier AI. California’s law took effect on 1 January 2026, while the EU’s transparency rules become enforceable on 2 August 2026. OpenAI’s framework gives regulators, rivals and customers a public benchmark for how the company says it manages high-risk model behaviour.

Alongside those developments, the fight over whether US states can regulate AI independently continues. In Colorado, xAI has challenged the state’s AI law in federal court, with the Department of Justice intervening in support of the company. Lawmakers have since signed a narrower replacement statute, but the litigation has left enforcement uncertain and exposed the difficulties companies face operating across multiple jurisdictions.

Taken together, the three episodes suggest AI governance is not converging around a single model. Copyright disputes, state-federal legal conflicts and frontier safety regimes are all advancing simultaneously, each with different rules, deadlines and costs. For AI companies, compliance is becoming less a unified strategy than a series of separate legal and political battles.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Pope Leo urges moral governance of AI to prioritise human dignity

Tue, 26 May 2026 15:26:57 +0000

The Vatican's encyclical calls for AI regulation based on law, oversight and human judgement
Pope warns against autonomous weapons, worker displacement and AI-driven conflict
Emphasises the importance of moral language in global AI governance debates

Pope Leo XIV has thrust the Vatican into the centre of the global debate over artificial intelligence, using his first encyclical to argue that the technology must be governed by law, oversight and human judgement rather than left to market forces or military competition.

Entitled Magnifica humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity” — the document presents AI as one of the defining moral questions of the age. The pope described the technology as something that should be “disarmed” from uses tied to domination, exclusion and death. Vatican officials said the text was shaped through consultations with scientists, educators, engineers, political leaders and families concerned about the world future generations will inherit.

The encyclical does not reject AI outright. Instead, Leo argues that technology is not inherently hostile to human flourishing, but neither is it neutral. His concern is that powerful systems can concentrate data and influence in the hands of a small number of companies, distort truth, weaken labour protections and encourage a culture in which life-and-death decisions are increasingly mediated by machines.

The pope was particularly direct on warfare. He warned against autonomous weapons and the remote conduct of conflict, as militaries expand their use of AI-driven targeting and surveillance. He also criticised the way AI can strip workers of dignity through displacement, exploitation and the reduction of people to data points.

His argument extends beyond economics and security into education and family life. Leo urged schools to help children engage responsibly with new technology and called on governments to establish legal safeguards, independent oversight and informed public consent. He also warned that ethical slogans mean little if the rules are written by a narrow elite with a vested interest in the outcome.

The message has found an audience well beyond the Church. Commentators said the encyclical could become a reference point in debates over AI governance, particularly because it connects technological change with Catholic social teaching on labour, dignity and the common good. The timing is also significant: the document marks the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum, Leo XIII’s landmark intervention on workers’ rights during the Industrial Revolution.

Source: Noah Wire Services