licensing Archives - The Media Copilot https://mediacopilot.ai/tag/licensing/ How AI is changing Media, journalism and content creation Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:56:16 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mediacopilot.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/cropped-cropped-Media-Copilot-favicon-60x60.jpeg licensing Archives - The Media Copilot https://mediacopilot.ai/tag/licensing/ 32 32 OpenAI-licensed publishers got 48% more ChatGPT citations in June, study finds https://mediacopilot.ai/openai-licensing-deals-chatgpt-citations-study/ Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:56:16 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=10679 The analysis found an OpenAI-linked citation premium on ChatGPT, while Google and Perplexity licensees saw no comparable advantage on their own platforms.

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News pages from publishers with OpenAI licensing deals received an average of 10.2 citations each on ChatGPT in June 2026. Pages from publishers without those deals received 6.9.

That 48% difference is the headline finding in a joint study from Press Ranger and OtterlyAI, which matched 129.3 million citations across seven AI platforms against confirmed licensing agreements between AI companies and news publishers.

The gap was larger among publishers that had signed only with OpenAI. Those outlets received 112% more citations per page on ChatGPT than unlicensed publishers, according to a joint study from Press Ranger and OtterlyAI. Across all seven platforms measured — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Claude — publishers in the OpenAI cohort had 46% more citations per cited page.

But the study does not show that licensing deals caused those differences.

OpenAI has largely signed prominent, English-language news organizations that may already have been more likely to appear in AI answers. The researchers normalized the results by citations per cited page, rather than total citations, which helps account for publisher size. It does not control for every difference between licensed and unlicensed outlets.

The results also varied by platform. Google-licensed publishers were cited at a slightly lower rate than comparable unlicensed publishers on Google AI Overviews. Perplexity licensees were roughly even with unlicensed publishers on Perplexity. Those findings do not establish whether the deals affect visibility elsewhere.

OpenAI-licensed publishers also received 57.9% of their AI citations from ChatGPT, a more concentrated mix than the one recorded for unlicensed publishers. OtterlyAI CEO Thomas Peham described the result this way: “A licensing deal does one clear thing: it tilts your citations toward ChatGPT.”

That should still be read as a correlation, not proof that OpenAI changed its systems because publishers signed contracts.

The study also looked at what kinds of news content AI systems cited. Best-of lists, buying guides and product reviews accounted for 46.9% of citations to licensed publishers. The researchers said the broader pattern favored service journalism, but the data do not show that format matters more than licensing status or that other kinds of reporting are excluded.

There are other limitations. The study was released by two companies with products tied to media distribution and AI visibility. Press Ranger distributes press releases, while OtterlyAI sells AI search monitoring. The analysis covers one month, has not been peer reviewed and does not include a published methodology explaining how comparable unlicensed publishers were selected.

For publishers, the findings add another data point to a wider debate over how news organizations should deal with AI companies. Cloudflare has argued that crawler blocking can give publishers more leverage in licensing negotiations, Microsoft has built a marketplace to broker publisher-developer deals, and some groups are pushing statutory licensing proposals. None of those developments proves that licensing itself produces more AI referrals or meaningful revenue.

Citation volume also says nothing about accuracy. The Tow Center’s 2024 examination of ChatGPT citations, covered by TechCrunch, found the chatbot misattributing and fabricating sources, including for publishers with licensing agreements.

Separate Tollbit data analyzed by Press Gazette found publishers with OpenAI deals received roughly seven times the ChatGPT clickthrough rate of publishers without them. That is a different dataset, however, and the Press Ranger-OtterlyAI study did not analyze referral traffic or licensing fees.

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Cloudflare says blocking AI crawlers is pushing publishers into licensing deals https://mediacopilot.ai/cloudflare-bot-blocking-publisher-ai-deals/ Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:11:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9997 A glowing cyan security gate blocks wireframe crawler-bots at a server entrance while one bot marked 'licensed' passes through a lit turnstile.Cloudflare says default AI crawler blocking is creating scarcity that pushes AI companies to license publisher content, and pay-per-use is next.

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People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel told investors this month that blocking AI crawlers is helping the publisher push AI companies toward deals, Press Gazette reports.

Vogel has previously said People Inc. uses Cloudflare to block most AI crawlers, except OpenAI, where it has a deal, and Google, whose crawler is tied to search. On the company’s Aug. 4 earnings call, he said that was changing negotiations.

“People are understanding the value of our content because we are able to restrict almost everybody from using our content using our Cloudflare blocking,” Vogel said. “And they have to pay for it. And when people have to pay for it, it seems they’re really coming to the table.”

Cloudflare says People Inc. is not alone in using blocking to win licensing deals. Chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen told Press Gazette that publishers are using bot-blocking tools to create “reliable scarcity” around their work, giving them more leverage with AI companies. Cloudflare said it is working with the Financial Times, The Atlantic, Ziff Davis, Condé Nast and the Associated Press.

The idea is simple: content is harder to negotiate over if AI companies can already take it for free.

Cloudflare introduced default AI crawler blocking for new domains last year. Its pay-per-crawl product remains in private beta. The company is now moving toward pay-per-use, where publishers are paid when their material is used in an AI answer rather than simply fetched — an evolution of a payment system we previously covered. Early work includes Ceramic.ai and You.com.

Cohen said crawling was simply the easiest thing to count. “Pay-per-use is a better signal of quality. If you’re scraping something, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re using it,” she said.

Cloudflare says more than half of AI crawler requests revisit pages that have not changed. It is testing with OpenAI a signal for when a page is worth crawling again.

Starting Sept. 15, Cloudflare will change its defaults for AI crawlers. Training and AI-agent crawlers will be blocked by default on ad-supported pages for new sites and existing free customers that have not changed their settings. Search crawlers will remain allowed. Mixed-use crawlers will be treated according to their most restrictive use, which could affect Googlebot.

But blocking is not foolproof. TollBit’s State of the Bots report found crawlers impersonating Google, rotating IP addresses and using residential proxies. People Inc. chief innovation officer Jonathan Roberts has said the company blocks tens of thousands of bad bots a day but cannot stop all of them.

Cohen said another weak point can be syndication: a publisher may lock down its own site while copies of the same work remain accessible elsewhere.

She also argues the model can work beyond the biggest publishers. Cohen pointed to local news, including the Park Record in Park City, Utah, where information may be available from only a limited number of sources. If that information is blocked, she said, AI companies that want it may have to pay.

That helps explain why most Cloudflare publisher customers are moving toward blocking AI bots by default and allowing access for companies with deals — a narrower version of the whitelisting approach some publishers are adopting.

Cloudflare gave the industry until Sept. 15 to adjust. Cohen said the delay was deliberate, because “the goal is not to block.”

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Axios bets OpenAI money can make local news newsletters profitable https://mediacopilot.ai/axios-openai-local-news-newsletters/ Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:38:14 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9943 OpenAI is funding 13 new Axios Local newsletters under a three-year deal whose financial terms neither company will disclose.

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Robert Sanchez publishes one newsletter covering Arapahoe County, Colorado, on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he turns to neighboring Douglas County.

Every local byline in both newsletters belongs to him.

Together, the two counties cover an area larger than Rhode Island. Other news organizations have multiple reporters covering individual cities within Sanchez’s beat.

His job exists, in part, because OpenAI is paying to create it.

Sanchez was hired as part of a three-year partnership between OpenAI and Axios. OpenAI is funding the startup costs for 13 Axios Local newsletters and providing Axios employees with credits for its enterprise AI tools. In return, Axios allows OpenAI to train its models on the company’s freely available journalism, according to reporting by Issie Lapowsky for Columbia Journalism Review.

Axios announced the first four markets covered by the deal in January 2025: Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boulder and Huntsville, Alabama. It added nine more this year.

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei has framed the experiment as a question of whether technology can lower the cost of local reporting without eliminating the reporter.

“Could we use AI to basically automate everything you need in a local market other than the journalist and the journalism itself?” he told CJR.

VandeHei has also said “AI will save local news,” an argument we previously examined against the economics of Axios’s model.

So far, those economics remain unsettled.

Axios Local has more than 2 million subscribers but is not profitable, which a company spokesperson told CJR was expected. VandeHei said he would consider the expansion “a great success” if each market became profitable within five years.

Axios expects to operate in 43 cities by the end of 2026. VandeHei eventually wants to reach 1,000. Local reporting jobs posted by the company in early August offered salaries ranging from $65,000 to $125,000.

One important part of the arrangement remains unknown: how much OpenAI is paying.

Both companies declined to disclose the value of the agreement. They also would not say whether it limits Axios’s ability to take legal action against OpenAI. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood told CJR that the terms are confidential.

Axios generally does not disclose the partnership in its local job listings or in stories about OpenAI unless those stories involve media deals. VandeHei said the contract does not spell out an editorial firewall because both companies considered Axios’s editorial independence a given.

One Axios employee, who spoke anonymously to CJR, said the lack of transparency has made some reporters uneasy.

Axios is not unionized. At Politico, employees challenged their company’s use of AI through their union and won an arbitration that led Politico to shut down two AI tools.

The Axios deal also raises a broader question about whether partnerships between individual publishers and AI companies can do much to address the decline of local journalism.

“If you strike a direct partnership with an AI company, that benefits you but no one else,” Matt Pearce, policy director at Rebuild Local News, told CJR. “There’s a systemic problem, and you’re not really doing anything to address the systemic problem. If anything, you’re kind of benefiting from it.”

The first markets also aren’t concentrated in places with the least access to journalism. Aside from Huntsville, which has no daily newspaper, none of the original cities qualify as news deserts under commonly used definitions.

VandeHei called expanding into communities without adequate local coverage “the Holy Grail.” But he said Axios first needs to prove the model can work in established markets.

For other publishers considering similar deals, Axios’s experiment shows both what an AI company may be willing to provide and what it may ask for in return.

Axios received startup funding and AI credits that are helping it put reporters into 13 markets. OpenAI received the right to train its models on Axios’s freely available journalism. But key terms of the agreement — including its value and whether it affects Axios’s ability to sue OpenAI — remain confidential.

That makes the arrangement different from OpenAI’s grants to the American Journalism Project. And whether the Axios model can eventually support itself without OpenAI’s money remains an open question.

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Apple weighs nine-figure budget to pay publishers for news in Siri AI https://mediacopilot.ai/apple-siri-ai-publisher-payments/ Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:01:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9885 Apple has approached news publishers about a pay-per-use compensation plan for Siri AI, with a reported budget starting at $100 million.

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Apple is considering spending at least $100 million to license news for its revamped Siri assistant, with publishers paid based on how often their reporting is used, according to Nieman Lab.

Apple has discussed a variable compensation plan that would pay publishers when Siri uses their reporting, rather than the flat licensing fees common in many AI content deals.

Apple already uses a similar model with Apple News+. Payments to publishers are based in part on the share of engagement their content generates on the platform, an approach that has also drawn complaints from publishers.

Apple first announced the revamped Siri in 2024, but its release has been delayed several times. It is now expected later this year. Beta testers at WIRED and The Verge have reported significant improvements, increasing Apple’s need for reliable, up-to-date news sources that Siri can use to answer questions about current events.

Apple is not building the new Siri alone. The company has a deal to use Google’s Gemini models for the assistant, and the Apple-Google partnership has already drawn antitrust scrutiny. That means publishers licensing content to Apple could also see their reporting used by an assistant powered in part by Google’s technology.

Usage-based payments have support elsewhere in the AI industry. Sam Altman has backed micropayments for AI agents as a way to compensate publishers when their content is used. The model could lower costs for AI companies, but it would also make licensing revenue less predictable for publishers and raise questions about how usage is measured and verified.

For publishers, Apple’s proposal adds another model to a growing mix of AI licensing arrangements. Meta licensed Newsmax content for AI search across its apps on undisclosed terms, while Google has changed how publisher links appear in AI Overviews, including by adding Top Stories carousels to some trending news queries. The approaches place different values on publisher content, from licensing fees and clicks to citations and individual uses. For publishers negotiating with Apple, a key question will be how those uses are counted and whether they can independently verify the data.

The potential payments are also small compared with the traffic losses publishers are facing. A $100 million pool divided among dozens of outlets would do little to offset declining search referrals, including a drop among UK publishers

No deals have been announced. The Wall Street Journal reported that discussions are underway, and Apple has not publicly detailed the proposal. The final terms, if agreements are reached, could show how much leverage publishers have as Apple looks for news content to support the new Siri.

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News Corp’s Thomson vows more AI lawsuits, calls out Perplexity and Brave https://mediacopilot.ai/news-corp-ai-slop-lawsuits/ Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:52:31 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9644 News Corp CEO Robert Thomson threatened new legal action against AI firms and their customers over scraped content.

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Speaking during the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said artificial intelligence is “only as useful, only as trustworthy, as the quality and integrity of its inputs.” Without professionally produced journalism and other creative work, he argued, AI systems risk leaving users with a “slimy sea” of low-quality output, as reported by TheWrap.

News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and publisher HarperCollins, is pursuing two tracks at once. It has licensing deals with OpenAI and Meta and says it is in “advanced discussions with several other honorable companies.” At the same time, it is suing companies it accuses of using its content without permission, including a countersuit against Brave over alleged scraping of WSJ and New York Post articles.

Thomson also named names. He said Perplexity remains a target of News Corp’s legal action and took aim at Brave, calling it “a company brave in name only.” He accused the company of using masked web crawlers to collect copyrighted articles and repackage them for business customers.

“Companies who buy from these pirates should know that they are in possession of stolen goods,” Thomson said.

But his broader warning was about who could face legal action next. News Corp, he said, is looking beyond the AI companies scraping and using its content to the businesses buying their products.

“We’re focusing not just on companies that have scraped and stolen our content, but on their clients who, knowingly or unknowingly, have purchased stolen goods,” Thomson said. “As for litigation, it’s far from over.”

Thomson also pushed back against the idea that licensing deals are a bad trade for publishers as AI search cuts into referral traffic, saying that the agreements with Meta and OpenAI are not “merely transactional.”

“We are creators; they are savvy distributors,” Thomson said. “Our inputs are crucial components of their outputs.”

Thomson confirmed that the Meta deal, reportedly worth $50 million a year, is already contributing to News Corp’s business. He said future agreements could include broad deals with major platforms as well as narrower licensing arrangements tailored to specific industries.

For other publishers, News Corp’s approach suggests that licensing and litigation are not really separate strategies. The company is using lawsuits to pressure AI companies to pay for access to its journalism, while licensing deals show what that access can be worth.

If News Corp expands its lawsuits to businesses that buy AI products, rather than limiting them to companies accused of scraping its content, more companies could face legal risk for using AI tools built on unlicensed journalism.

“There are more deals to come,” Thomson said in his final remark. “And hopefully not too much litigation.”

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Judge allows Reddit’s data scraping lawsuit against Perplexity to procee https://mediacopilot.ai/reddit-perplexity-data-scraping-lawsuit/ Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:50:55 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9530 A Manhattan judge advanced most of Reddit's copyright and conspiracy claims against Perplexity and three data-scraping firms over AI training data.

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A Manhattan federal judge on Friday refused to dismiss the core of Reddit’s lawsuit against Perplexity AI, allowing the platform to pursue claims that the AI search startup illegally bypassed technical protections to scrape Reddit content without paying for a license.

The ruling doesn’t determine whether Perplexity broke the law. But it does keep alive a legal theory that could prove as important as copyright in the battle over AI training data: that circumventing a platform’s access controls can itself create liability.

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled that Reddit can continue pursuing claims that Perplexity and three data scraping companies unlawfully bypassed protections designed to limit automated access to Reddit content, according to Reuters. He also found that Reddit has standing to sue over the alleged misuse of posts created by its users.

The defendants include Lithuania-based Oxylabs, Russia-based AWMProxy and Texas-based SerpApi. Reddit alleges the companies extracted its content from billions of search results without permission and that Perplexity worked with at least one of them to obtain the data. Perplexity, which does not license Reddit’s content, denies the allegations.

While Engelmayer dismissed several secondary claims, he allowed Reddit’s central allegations—including conspiracy and unlawful circumvention—to move forward.

Perplexity argues Reddit is attempting to control access to publicly available webpages it doesn’t own, using security measures it didn’t create and on behalf of users who never authorized the lawsuit. The company says it will continue defending what it calls the open internet.

Reddit argues the issue isn’t whether its content is publicly visible but whether companies deliberately bypassed technical barriers to collect it at scale without permission or compensation.

SerpApi attorney Jeff Homrig echoed that view, arguing the company accesses public search results rather than Reddit itself and that publicly available information doesn’t become proprietary simply because a platform later decides to charge for access.

That distinction could have broad consequences across the AI industry.

Reddit has transformed its user-generated content into a licensing business, striking deals with Google and OpenAI while describing itself in court filings as the most frequently cited source in AI-generated answers. If companies can obtain the same data by scraping around access controls, the value of those licensing agreements is diminished.

The lawsuit is one of a growing number testing how AI companies acquire training data. Authors, record labels, news publishers and other content owners have all sued AI developers over the use of copyrighted material. Reddit is also pursuing a separate lawsuit against Anthropic in California state court over similar scraping allegations.

For publishers, platforms and AI companies, Friday’s ruling is significant because it points beyond copyright. A favorable ruling on Reddit’s circumvention claims could give content owners another legal lever to protect their data—and strengthen their hand in negotiating AI licensing agreements.

The case is still in its early stages. But by allowing the core scraping and circumvention claims to proceed, the Southern District of New York has signaled that the next major battleground over AI training data may not be copyright alone. It may be whether AI companies can legally get around the digital gates content owners have built.

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Meta licenses Newsmax journalism for AI search across Facebook and Instagram https://mediacopilot.ai/meta-newsmax-ai-licensing/ Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:16:24 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9408 Meta’s Newsmax license gives its AI search and discovery tools access to current and archived news content across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

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Newsmax’s current and archived reporting will feed Meta’s AI-powered search and discovery tools under a licensing agreement announced Tuesday, giving the social media company another publisher partner as it builds news answers into its products.

The agreement reported by The Desk covers Meta services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and extends to current and future consumer devices sold by the company. Meta will use the material to train its AI-supported search and discovery tools, while those tools will also link users to Newsmax stories and videos and generate short summaries from written work.

Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax’s chief executive, welcomed the deal in a statement to The Desk: “Newsmax applauds the significant resources Meta is putting into AI to keep America at the forefront of this emerging technology.” He added that the publisher wanted to help users reach timely, high-quality journalism through AI technologies.

The reported terms do not include a price or other financial details. That leaves a central question unanswered for publishers weighing similar deals: what compensation reflects the value of an archive, a daily reporting operation and traffic that may be intercepted by an AI-written answer before a reader reaches the original article.

Newsmax joins a growing group of right-of-center outlets that have signed Meta agreements, including Fox News Media, the Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner. The Desk also reports that Meta has reached content arrangements with News Corp, Warner Bros. Discovery, USA Today Company and People Inc.

Meta’s stated aim is broader than adding another political perspective. In comments cited by The Desk from December, the company said it wants Meta AI to become more responsive, accurate and balanced, particularly during breaking news events when its AI systems struggle to keep pace. Meta is integrating the assistant across its consumer products, placing search, recommendations and conversational answers inside the same ecosystem.

That goal remains untested. Licensing news publishers gives Meta a clearer legal basis to use their reporting than scraping the web or relying on unresolved fair-use claims. But it does not answer how Meta AI will choose sources, attribute reporting, summarize competing accounts or weigh conflicting information. Adding more publishers expands the pool of reporting. It does not, on its own, ensure balanced results.

For newsrooms and publishers, the Meta-Newsmax agreement underscores how AI licensing has become as much a distribution strategy as a rights negotiation. As more publishers strike AI licensing agreements, attention is likely to shift from financial terms to attribution, referral traffic, transparency and the distinction between training rights and real-time content use.

Meta’s next test is execution. The company will need to show that licensed journalism makes Meta AI faster, more reliable and better sourced without reducing publisher reporting to an invisible input. Newsmax has secured a place in that effort. The success of the agreement will ultimately be measured less by how much Newsmax content appears in Meta AI than by whether AI-generated answers still create an economic incentive to produce the original reporting.

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Muck Rack licenses MIT Technology Review for expanded AI news monitoring https://mediacopilot.ai/muck-rack-ai-monitoring/ Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:35:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9342 Muck Rack has licensed MIT Technology Review’s full editorial coverage, including paywalled reporting, for its AI-focused communications monitoring platform.

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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.

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Citing trusted news brands increases confidence in AI responses, UK Ipsos survey finds https://mediacopilot.ai/trusted-news-sources-ai-trust-survey/ Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:17:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9350 A UK Ipsos survey for AOP finds that trust in cited news brands strongly shapes trust in AI-generated answers.

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Trust in AI answers rises and falls with the credibility of their sources. More than 90% of people trusted an AI response when they completely trusted its cited source, but that figure plunged to about 10% when they completely distrusted the source, according to new findings reported by Press Gazette.

The figures come from an Ipsos survey of 1,000 UK adults for the Association of Online Publishers’ Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study. The findings show that AI can distill reporting into a polished answer, but users ultimately judge that answer by the credibility of the news organization it cites.

The effect extended even to publishers respondents felt neutral about. Trust in the AI answer was only about 25% when the cited source was rated neither trusted nor distrusted. The survey measures correlation, not causation, and reflects stated attitudes rather than observed behavior. Even so, the pattern is unmistakable.

Trust also affected reported willingness to visit the underlying publisher. Nearly half of people who somewhat or completely trusted a cited source said they would click at least one link in an AI response. That finding fits a wider pattern covered in The Media Copilot’s reporting on news brands and AI clicks: the publisher’s name may still be what persuades users to leave the chatbot, even as AI interfaces give them fewer reasons to click elsewhere.

There is an uncomfortable counterpoint. Even when users completely trusted the cited source, nearly a third said they would stop at the AI answer rather than click through. That figure was similar among those who completely distrusted the source. A citation alone can make an AI answer more credible without delivering the visit, subscription opportunity, or advertising impression that paid for the original reporting.

The study also found that 37% of respondents did not know AI tools can fabricate information or sources. That rose to about 45% among 45- to 54-year-olds. The result matters because a polished answer can borrow authority from reputable citations while still getting a claim wrong, omitting context or inventing a detail.

AI companies have good reason to seek current, attributable reporting. OpenAI’s partnership with News Corp is one public example of the licensing deals that give chatbots access to professional journalism. Yet the confidentiality of many licensing deals makes it difficult for publishers to know whether they are being fairly compensated for the credibility their reporting brings to AI answers.

For newsrooms, the immediate task is less about winning back every lost referral than preserving the conditions that make their reporting worth citing. Clear attribution, strong archive pages, distinctive analysis and direct audience relationships matter when an AI answer becomes the first read. Publishers also need to decide which crawlers and products earn access.

The survey’s implication is clear. AI platforms are borrowing trust that publishers spent decades building, while publishers risk capturing only a fraction of the value it creates. As AI answers become the default gateway to information, the rules governing licensing, attribution and publisher control will determine whether publishers can still turn trust into revenue.

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OpenAI invests another $8 million in the American Journalism Project https://mediacopilot.ai/openai-local-news-american-journalism-project/ Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:45:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=9188 OpenAI is committing $5 million and $3 million in tech credits to the American Journalism Project over the next two years.

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OpenAI is putting another $5 million and $3 million in technology credits behind the American Journalism Project over the next two years, executives told Axios in an exclusive report. The renewal extends a partnership that began in 2023, when the company committed $5 million in funds and another $5 million in credits to the nonprofit.

That original deal helped launch AJP’s Product & AI Studio, which helps nonprofit local outlets build AI-powered products and workflows. In its first run, AJP delivered direct grants to 31 of its 50-plus portfolio organizations across 38 states. With the new money, CEO Sarabeth Berman says AJP plans to fund more of its newsroom partners while broadening access to ChatGPT’s enterprise products.

Tom Rubin, OpenAI’s chief of intellectual property and content, framed the arrangement as mission-driven rather than commercial. “These partnerships are consistent with our mission and have demonstrated great success,” he told Axios. “We’re committed to them because they demonstrate that the technology can benefit society.”

Member newsrooms used the funding on things reporters and fundraisers deal with every day: donor communications, data analysis, translation and civic information tools for readers. The next stage moves past one-off experiments toward shared products and infrastructure that smaller newsrooms could use together, according to AJP.

AJP is one of several local news bets OpenAI has placed. The company runs an AI collaborative and fellowship with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism that backs metro publishers including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Minnesota Star Tribune and the Seattle Times. It funded an expansion of Axios Local into new markets in 2025, and it provides grants and training to newsrooms in the global trade group WAN-IFRA.

The timing matters because OpenAI is buying goodwill with publishers while fighting them in court. It faces copyright suits from the New York Times and from eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital, part of a broader wave of legal disputes over how AI systems use published work. Other firms have been slower to sign licensing deals, and some, including OpenAI backer Microsoft, are exploring models that would pay publishers per use instead.

For newsrooms weighing whether to take this kind of money, the opportunity comes with tradeoffs. Grants and credits lower the cost of experimenting with AI, but they come from a company that news organizations are also suing over training data. The tools that help a local outlet translate coverage or draft donor emails are built by the same industry accused of scraping journalism without permission.

“Deploying AI effectively is ultimately a leadership challenge,” Berman said. “News organizations really have to think about how they smartly integrate these technologies in ways that have good policies, have humans in the lead and support the journalistic quality of the news organizations.”

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