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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
NYT chief: Why publishers should fight AI ‘tsunami’ | Ad blocklists getting worse
Plus Mandelson and Streeting wooed News UK bosses days before general election
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Tuesday, 2 June.
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🌊 New York Times chairman AG Sulzberger urged publishers to take up the fight against the AI “tsunami” in a keynote speech yesterday at the World News Media Congress in Marseille.
He revealed that The New York Times has already spent $20m fighting lawsuits against OpenAI/Microsoft and Perplexity over the theft of its content.
And he issued a timely reminder that the burgeoning AI industry is built on wholesale theft of copyright content.
In many cases the AI engines are only able to offer convincing answers because they have illegally copied huge swathes of original news content.
More than three years on from the launch of ChatGPT we still seem to be stuck in the equivalent of the Napster era for news (the period around the turn of the millennium when file sharing threatened to kill the music industry).
While individual publishers can do little on their own, Sulzberger urged us to act collectively and also had some useful suggestions on how to develop resilience in the AI era.
This passage from his speech particularly struck home for me: “Many news organisations undermined and commoditised themselves trying to feed the constantly shifting preferences of search and social algorithms with clickbait, aggregation and hot takes.
“The economics of that approach will get even worse. To be a destination in a world intermediated by AI, you’ll need journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity. The heart of that is original reporting. The public has no other source for this work. Neither does AI.”
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🚨 The most lucrative deployment of AI thus far has involved crunching vast amounts of audience data to serve personalised ads to users of tech platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Google.
Given the tech savviness of the advertising industry, it is astonishing that so many brands still use simple keyword blocklists to control which websites their advertising appears on.
This summer thousands of news stories about the football World Cup will be starved of advertising because they contain words such as “shoot” and “attack”.
Research shows that even when it comes to genuine coverage of war, readers are savvy enough to read a serious story and look at an advert for a car without blaming Volkswagen for the latest Russian drone strike on civilians.
CEO of Newsworks Jo Allan has written for Press Gazette about why keyword blocking is getting worse, not better, as the UK news industry marketing body urges advertisers to “put their trust back in professional editors and journalists”.
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