Media leaders talk Big Tech, the AI future, and journalism

Leading figures in the media industry met at Columbia Journalism School for a two-day event, hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security, focused on the role of generative AI in the newsroom. 

Technology reporters from publications including the New York Times, 404 Media, and The City were present, along with academics and AI experts. As part of the event, the Tow Center revealed preliminary findings from a forthcoming report on the relationship between news publishers and platforms in the AI era, drawing on more than thirty interviews with newsroom leaders, platform executives, and academic experts. (A livestream of the event is still available on YouTube.)

One of the main points of discussion throughout the event was the (increasingly strained) relationship between news publishers and tech platforms. For decades, the former have been trying to get the latter—in particular, Google and Meta—to compensate them for the news they distribute and profit from. Progress was made, at least on the news side, in 2021, when Australia introduced a first-of-its-kind “tech tax,” a law that resulted in around two hundred and fifty million Australian dollars flowing into newsrooms yearly. According to Anya Schiffrin—the director of the technology and media specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a panelist at the event—this success made Google and Meta worry that the laws would spread. In a raw exercise of corporate power, Schiffrin alleged, tech platforms started “throwing money and lawyers” at similar bills elsewhere, to get them killed. 

From there, the situation became even more complicated: when Canada followed suit with the Online News Act, Meta refused to play ball, pulling its funding for journalism in Canada and blocking news on Facebook and Instagram. (Lauren Watson wrote about the effects of the Facebook news ban for CJR this week; we’ll have more on that in tomorrow’s newsletter. In the end, Google agreed to pay Canadian publishers one hundred million Canadian dollars annually to link to their articles.) In the US, California considered adopting a similar law to reverse the decline in local media, as Cameron Joseph wrote for CJR earlier this year. But in July, lawmakers in the state decided to shelve the legislation and instead commit two hundred and fifty million dollars over five years to bolster local journalism, with Google covering the majority of the sum. An inadequate figure, according to Schiffrin: “It went from something that should have been billions of dollars into absolute peanuts.” 

As we have entered the era of generative AI, the relationship between platforms and publishers has continued to sour. Perhaps most notably, the New York Times sued OpenAI, arguing that it infringed the paper’s copyright when it trained its large language models on millions of Times articles without permission. In an apparent attempt to appease publishers, AI companies are now writing checks to newsrooms to license their content for training purposes. As my colleague and Tow research director Pete Brown has written, the big question for many newsrooms becomes: “Deal or no deal? (For those not invited to the table, it’s more a case of: Deal with it.)” 

Whether to take such deals—and if they’re even suitable for the news industry—was another key talking point at the event. “If we’ve learned anything in this business in the last ten years, it’s that we have to be aggressive about owning our own technology and staying up with what’s changing. But that costs money,” Kimberly Lau, vice president of consumer media and president of Scientific American, said. “I wouldn’t say that I absolutely would do a deal tomorrow, but I would much rather be engaging and having a conversation and have a seat at the table than be left out of the conversations altogether.” (Currently, Scientific American is not party to any licensing deal.) 

Read more at CJR.