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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Time and Axios turn AI into ad revenue | Law against deceptive AI scraping backed
Plus Liz Murdoch part of $27m fundraising round for Piers Morgan media company and climate scientists say news coverage ignores UK heatwave cause
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Good afternoon from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 24 June.
🌴The tech takeover of the global advertising industry was even more apparent at this year’s still obscenely opulent Cannes Lions conference.
A short walk from the beachfront mini festivals run by the likes of Amazon, Meta, Tiktok and Google, Press Gazette hosted a meeting of la resistance - the publishers fighting a rearguard action to make sure news remains part of the marketing mix.
The discussions on board our “News Yacht” actually included some encouraging signs that publishers remain incredibly important to brands when it comes to the way they are portrayed in AI answers.
The Washington Post has started selling sponsored answers on its in-house AI chatbot and Hearst UK is using AI to analyse its own audience data and plan more effective marketing campaigns for paying clients.
Time is now even publishing and commercialising content that is invisible to humans but designed to be read by the AI agents who are informing, and even making, purchasing decisions.
Many thanks to our News Yacht sponsors: Q5, PA Media, Equativ and Propeller for helping to keep journalism in the conversation at Cannes this year.
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🤖 Still in the world of AI, we report on a welcome legislative development in the UK where an upcoming bill is seeking to outlaw deceptive bot scrapers.
There is an amoral content-scraping industry that exists outside the major LLM players which uses bots to copy and sell publisher content. Publishers find it hard to block these bots because they are constantly changing their names and sometimes mimic humans or legitimate companies.
The Automated Online Software (Access and Transparency) Bill is the latest in a range of weapons being deployed to help publishers counter the wholesale theft and exploitation of their work by the AI industry.
It is still not quite up there with the £15m a year he was being paid by News UK to front its short-lived TV news channel TalkTV. But it is reassuring to see that there is life after failure (again and again) for the indefatigable Morgan.
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🌅 And UK climate scientists have written a letter to editors urging them to make clearer the link to climate change when it comes to reporting of the current heatwave in the UK.
It's part of an ongoing debate around climate change coverage. Most editors appear to believe the man-made warming of the Earth’s atmosphere is one of the most important stories they can tell.
But day-to-day news hooks are not always there to hang stories on. And journalists are (understandably in my view) reluctant to assert a causal link between greenhouse gas emissions and every extreme weather event.