MIT Technology Review’s paywalled articles will now be available through Muck Rack‘s monitoring platform under a licensing deal that expands communications teams’ access to artificial intelligence and emerging technology coverage. In its announcement of the deal, Muck Rack said it is the first communications platform to license the publication’s content.
The agreement gives Muck Rack customers access to the publication’s full editorial output, rather than only material visible on the open web. That helps eliminate a blind spot created by paywalls, giving companies a fuller view of coverage, competitors and reputational risks.
Muck Rack has been building a roster of direct publisher deals, recently adding Bloomberg Media and STAT, according to the announcement. MIT Technology Review, founded at MIT in 1899, covers the business, policy and social effects of technology as well as technical developments.
Natan Edelsburg, Muck Rack’s chief partnerships officer, said the arrangement reflects the company’s effort to work directly with publishers while giving users access to trusted AI reporting. Ted Hu, senior manager of licensing at MIT Technology Review, said the deal takes the publication’s reporting to communications professionals beyond its usual journalist and technologist audience.
Muck Rack is pitching the deal as a way to help communications teams track how brands appear in both AI-generated answers and traditional news coverage. The company said earned media, referring to unpaid editorial coverage such as news articles, accounts for 84% of citations in responses from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, while journalism makes up 27% of sources cited by those AI systems. Muck Rack did not disclose its methodology, time frame or underlying dataset, so the figures could not be independently verified.
The licensing model is more concrete than those numbers. It gives Muck Rack permission to distribute and search reporting that would otherwise be restricted, while giving a publisher a commercial route into enterprise monitoring. It also differs from the unresolved question of whether AI companies need permission to train on publishers’ archives.
For publishers, the deal reflects a broader effort to monetize journalism beyond subscriptions and advertising. As news organizations challenge search engines and AI companies over the use of their reporting, licensing agreements provide a way to generate revenue while ensuring their content is available through enterprise platforms. The arrangement also highlights the growing value of credible journalism as AI systems and communications professionals increasingly rely on it.
Muck Rack’s next challenge is proving customers will pay for licensed access when many media monitoring tools still rely on publicly available content. If more publishers sign similar agreements, media monitoring could become a new licensing channel for news organizations rather than another way their content is used without compensation.
