Can Licensing Newsroom Data to AI Companies Generate Meaningful Revenue? Despite price uncertainty, there are steps news organizations can take now to prepare to license their content to AI companies.

I also wrote about Bria - in my latest article on what newsrooms can do to prepare to license their content to AI companies:

And, in order to do so, we created an attribution technology patented with more than 30 patents today. So this attribution technology knows to tell who should be rewarded when we generate something."

"What we need to create is a new data economy. The way that we will create this data economy is that we will not steal data and we will go to all the data owners and tell them 'if you will give us your data, we will train a legal model and we will give you part of our revenue.'

The real battle in AI isn’t capability. It’s trust. Can AI-generated media be trusted? Dr. Yair Adato of Bria breaks down licensed data, attribution, and the future of AI in media.

On my commute today I listened to the CEO of Bria, Yair Adato, on Media Copilot talk about how they have made generative AI models for a new "data economy" . Really recommend a listen for insight into where we might be headed.

The BBC has used an AI generated voice on this content.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

When I talk to friends who are not in the news industry it is clear to me that the audience of these stories do not know how little time is spent producing them.

Try and talk to the journalists who write these stories. My suspicion is that they probably aren’t very happy. A journalism lecturer told me that local newspapers used to be journalists’ first job but now it is the Daily Mail. The key question to ask: how many stories do you write per day?

Alas we can't have everything we want so I am not at the
@journalismfestival.com
#ijf26.

So,colleagues in Perugia, if you hear of uses of generative AI that other newsrooms should copy or avoid then please tell me which panel it was mentioned on so I can watch back!

News organizations reconsider ties to AI company Nota after plagiarism findings - Poynter The Boston Globe told staff to stop using Nota’s AI tools; other outlets say the company still lists them as clients after they walked away

The Boston Globe told staff to stop using Nota’s AI tools after @poynterinstitute.bsky.social exposed "extensive plagiarism" on the Nota News sites.

@angelanfu.bsky.social reports:

What Rose from Bluesky looks like

Looking to interview journalists at #ijf26 about what we can build for you. Please comment below or dm me if you're open to chatting 🙏 I'm here till Sunday and this is what I look like. Please come say hi if you see me milling about this beautiful town

"helping local news providers adapt to the emerging challenges of AI-generated news summaries,by supporting the market-led development of a healthy licensing ecosystem between AI developers and rightsholders including local media while also working with industry to ensure proportionate transparency"

Amplify: The Local Media Action Plan

I am only just now reading through the UK's local media action plan.

Something relevant for those of us in the intersection of AI and news, is this:
The government aims to support getting to a "healthier licensing ecosystem between AI developers and rightsholders".

I’ll be there. Give me a wave if you are going and let’s grab coffee!

Grammarly Lawsuit Shows Existing Laws Can Combat Deepfakes Calls for new deepfake laws overlook the strength—and breadth—of existing legal protections.

The lawsuit challenging Grammarly's product which allows users to edit text “in the style” of identifiable journalists and scholars illustrates not need for new laws but the underappreciated breadth and aplicability of current law to generative AI, writes @profrothman.bsky.social.

Has any newsroom out here used NotebookLM as a collaborative research tool for the newsroom?

I imagine: you have a long running story (eg Grenfell inquiry) and you are a 24 hour newsroom. Could the correspondent whose patch this is upload the best docs for the night shift breaking news journalists?

ProPublica journalists walk off the job in first U.S. newsroom strike over AI On the picket line in New York, union leaders said they expect "more concentrated conflicts" over AI in the news industry.

Yesterday, the ProPublica Guild walked off the job in the first strike by a major U.S. newsroom over, at least in part, AI protections.

I spoke with striking journalists and union leaders on the picket line in New York for @niemanlab.org. www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/prop...

Do you know what I miss?

Pitching 500-word articles on pop culture. I don’t want to write them. Just pitch them.

@mrjonkelly.bsky.social is here

An AI company set out to fix news deserts. Instead, it copied local journalists’ work - Poynter Nota shut down its news sites after Axios and Poynter found dozens of plagiarized quotes, phrases and photos

Leaders said Nota News was an experiment not meant to be seen by readers. But some of the company’s actions conflict with that.

A Sept. 16 Nota press release touts the initiative, which included Microsoft, TollBit and BizBudding’s Springwire as partners. The release listed URLs of all 11 sites.

The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review Writer and author Alex Preston said he “made a serious mistake” after a reader spotted similarities between his review and one that appeared in the Guardian

The New York Times has dropped a freelance journalist after discovering he used AI to help write a book review that pulled sections of a review of the same book in The Guardian www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

This example inspired me to write a whole article about newsrooms' AI budgets (with real numbers!): generative-ai-newsroom.com/how-to-budge...

If someone expects you to conjure up a new AI tool out of thin air, share these numbers for how much other newsrooms spent on their AI projects:

generative-ai-newsroom.com/how-to-budge...

The dictionary sues OpenAI | TechCrunch Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster say that OpenAI violated the copyright of almost 100,000 articles by using them for LLM training.

Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Merriam-Webster dictionary are suing OpenAI for taking their content and generating AI summaries of copyrighted works which they say compete with their publications.
techcrunch.com/2026/03/16/m...

ProPublica’s union authorizes the first U.S. newsroom strike over AI protections The Guild has voted to walk off the job if ProPublica doesn’t agree to a ban on AI-related layoffs, as well as “just cause” for firings, seniority provisions during layoffs, and wage increases.

The @propublicaguild.org's vote marks the first time a major U.S. newsroom has authorized a strike, at least in part, over AI protections.

www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/prop...

Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines Let us know if you see more.

Google is experimenting with changing headlines in search results

Google said the aim is to "identify content on a page that would be a useful and relevant title to a users’ query" www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...

““Responses to these requests came in the form of emails, spreadsheets and pdfs...

"To expedite processing this large volume of data, Reuters used Gemini 2.5 Pro... to read and extract the temperature log information, outputting the results in JSON format."

GitHub - reuters-graphics/prison-heat-records: Data obtained for Retuers story on prisons and heat Data obtained for Retuers story on prisons and heat - reuters-graphics/prison-heat-records

AND... they published their dataset which they painstakingly collected.

“Reuters filed public records requests to every state and federal corrections department in the U.S. asking for data on the presence of air conditioning systems in housing units and copies of indoor temperature logs.”

How Reuters collected and analyzed prison temperature data Reuters analyzed air conditioning and indoor temperature log data, obtained through public records request, to better understand how heat affects U.S. prisons

Their methodology explains how they checked AI outputs:

“Reuters assessed the AI extraction process by calculating the exact match rate — the percentage of entries where the AI output exactly matched the original handwritten PDF — and the degree of difference between the values.
”

Scorching cells How heat threatens lives in America’s prisons

I linked to the audio version of this prison heat story before when I should have linked to the main text piece by Disha Raychaudhuri, @claretfarley.bsky.social and @adolfux.bsky.social. It's worth a read.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok are all bad at crediting news outlets, but ChatGPT is the worst (at least in this study) "ChatGPT, one of the most widely used models, covered distinctive content in 54% of responses but almost never credited the originating newsroom."

"ChatGPT, one of the most widely used models, covered distinctive content in 54% of responses but almost never credited the originating newsroom." www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/chat...