5:23 pm - July 9, 2025
For a long time I thought it was the most cynical thing I had heard in my working life. “There are no prizes for being right, Alan,” said the senior executive during a conversation about whether we should sign up to a shiny new initiative that was being dangled in…...
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Condé Nast has taken full control of Wired Middle East, bringing the title in-house after five years under licence with Dubai-based publisher Nervora. The move expands the New York-based publisher’s presence in the region and signals a deeper commitment to covering science, technology and innovation in the Middle East. Wired…
Fortune magazine is ramping up its use of artificial intelligence in news production with a new editorial push called Fortune Intelligence, aimed at accelerating breaking news coverage while maintaining human editorial oversight. The initiative, first reported by Semafor, will be led by Nick Lichtenberg, a former Fortune editor who returns…
The Dallas Morning News has named Colleen McCain Nelson as its new executive editor. Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with nearly three decades of experience, will take up the role on August 11. Currently executive editor of the Sacramento Bee and regional editor for McClatchy in California, Nelson has overseen five newsrooms. Her appointment follows a four-month national search to find a leader to guide the Dallas newsroom through digital transformation and regional expansion. She replaces Katrice Hardy, who left earlier this year to run The Marshall Project. Nelson spent 12 years at the Morning News earlier in her career,…
Douglas McCabe, the long-serving CEO of Enders Analysis, is joining the Guardian later this year as its chief strategy and business development officer. The move marks a major career shift for one of the UK media sector’s most influential analysts. “It is an enormous honour to be asked to support a journalism brand of unique...
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South Africa’s largest media company, Media24, has reported a 17% fall in revenue for the financial year ending March 2025, as it winds down most of its print operations and accelerates a shift to digital. Revenue dropped from R3.2 billion ($175 million) in 2024 to R2.58 billion ($141 million) this year. The decline reflects deep structural changes in South African media, with shrinking readership, falling ad revenues and rising distribution costs making many print titles unsustainable. Over the past year, Media24 has scrapped most of its printed newspapers – including Beeld, Rapport, City Press, Daily Sun and Soccer Laduma. Parent…
Google has launched a new tool called Offerwall, designed to help publishers offset the sharp decline in traffic caused by the rise of AI-powered search. Announced on 26 June, the tool offers alternative ways for users to access content, including micro payments, ad viewing and survey participation, with the aim of generating revenue beyond the traditional, traffic-dependent advertising model. Available for free through Google Ad Manager after a year-long trial with 1,000 publishers, Offerwall uses AI to determine the best time to present these options to visitors. Publishers can also add custom actions such as newsletter signups. They retain full…
The BBC has launched two public pilots using generative AI to support its newsroom operations, part of a broader push to explore how artificial intelligence can help with news production while maintaining editorial control and transparency. The first pilot uses AI to generate bullet-point summaries of longer articles. These “At a glance” summaries are designed to give readers – particularly younger audiences – a quick and accessible way to grasp the main points of a story. Journalists generate the summary using a standard prompt, then review and edit the result before publication. “Short, scannable bullet-point summaries have proven popular with…
Artificial Intelligence is reshaping journalism faster than any previous technological shift and demands urgent adaptation from media professionals, warned Rosental Alves at the 10th Innovation, Technology and Journalism conference in Buenos Aires. Alves, a veteran journalist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, described the rise of AI…
Canada is rethinking how it regulates artificial intelligence, moving away from the sweeping framework proposed under the previous government and instead crafting a new set of rules that place copyright and cultural protection at the centre. Evan Solomon, the country’s first federal AI minister, told The Logic the government was…
The BBC has issued a legal threat to AI startup Perplexity, accusing it of using BBC content without permission to train and power its artificial intelligence tools. The move, first reported by the Financial Times, marks the broadcaster’s first action in defence of its intellectual property against generative AI firms.…
Axel Springer is aiming to double its value within five years, with a bold plan built around artificial intelligence, platform independence and clearly stated political values. The ambition was laid out by CEO Mathias Döpfner at the company’s first major strategy meeting since its transformation back into a private media…...
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Louis Dreyfus, the ceo of Le Monde, explained that he decided to sign deals with AI companies to allow them use the French newspaper’s content because they were doing it anyway. Speaking at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media India conference in Chennai last week, Dreyfus said: “You can put a sign on…
News Corp has extended the contract of its chief executive Robert Thomson to June 2030, backing his leadership through a decade of change that has seen the company’s share price rise 140%. Thomson, who has led the publisher since 2013, was previously contracted until 2027. His time in charge has…
Hearst has introduced a voice-controlled AI assistant on its recipe site Delish, offering home cooks hands-free guidance through recipes. The tool, called Cooking Coach, was originally developed as a weekend experiment by Alexandria Redmon, Hearst’s senior director of AI initiatives, and has since grown into a full-featured product that addresses…
News publishers in India are asking the same questions and facing the same issues as those in the US and Europe was the conclusion after two days of discussions and presentations at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media India conference in Chennai this week. They may be only just starting to face…...
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European media outlets are facing an intensifying battle against disinformation and foreign interference, threats that have grown increasingly sophisticated since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Speaking at WEXFO 2025, Paolo Cesarini, chair of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) executive board, warned that the continent’s democracies are under sustained hybrid assault. He cited a 2022 European Parliament report naming Russia and China as key sources of destabilising tactics, including disinformation, covert funding and espionage – all designed to weaken democratic institutions from within. Public concern over these threats is high. A Eurobarometer survey found that 81% of EU citizens…
Broadcasters in the UK are facing the same crisis of audience disengagement that has gripped the newspaper industry in recent years, as rising news fatigue prompts a sharp drop in interest, particularly among younger viewers. Data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows public interest in news has fallen from 70% in 2015 to just 38% in 2024. It’s an indicator of how constant exposure to negative headlines is pushing people away from the very content media organisations rely on to maintain public engagement and trust. The trend is not just affecting audiences. “Sometimes I choose music…
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Harvard University has opened up nearly one million digitised books for use in training artificial intelligence models – a move likely to be closely watched by publishers as they negotiate with or sue AI companies over access to copyrighted content. The dataset, unveiled through Harvard’s Institutional Data Initiative, includes around 394 million pages and an estimated 242 billion tokens, making it one of the largest public domain corpora available for AI research. The collection spans texts from the 15th century onwards, covering more than 250 languages, with a particular concentration of material from the 19th century. It marks the first…
The Washington Post is in talks with Substack about a potential collaboration that would allow it to broaden its opinion coverage by tapping into the newsletter platform’s network of independent writers. The move, confirmed by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie in an interview with The Guardian, signals a notable shift in how legacy media views a...
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A new study commissioned by German media rights group Corint Media has reignited debate over how publishers should be compensated for their content in an era of AI-driven search. The report claims Google rightly owes German publishers €1.3 billion annually for using journalistic material in features like AI Overviews. At the centre of the dispute...
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Taboola has launched a generative AI answer engine called DeeperDive that aims to help publishers compete with AI-powered search while giving users richer, more contextual responses to their questions. The technology is being adopted in the US by Gannett and the USA Today Network, and in the UK by The Independent. It is designed to...
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The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has launched a daily YouTube show, The Daily Blueprint, in what it calls a key part of its digital strategy ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections. The weekday broadcast, hosted by DNC deputy communications director Hannah Muldavin, is pitched as a way to counter misinformation, explain news headlines and offer viewers ways to support Democratic campaigns across the country. Ken Martin, chair of the DNC, said the launch marked an important evolution. “The launch of The Daily Blueprint is an exciting new step for the Democratic Party – it cements our commitment to meet…
Le Monde Group celebrated its 80th anniversary with record-breaking subscription figures that signal growing public appetite for trusted journalism. In an article published this week, the group’s CEO Louis Dreyfus and his fellow director Jérôme Fenoglio, highlighted that daily paid circulation is now the highest in its history, at above 530,000 copies, and well beyond...
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The case before London’s High Court accuses the AI firm of illegally using millions of its images to train its Stable Diffusion model. Getty Images has launched a high-profile copyright lawsuit against artificial intelligence firm Stability AI, with proceedings now under way at London’s High Court. The case is expected to set significant legal precedents...
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Japan’s main newspaper association has renewed its demand that generative AI companies seek permission before using journalistic content to train their models, warning that current practices amount to “free-riding” and threaten the sustainability of the country’s news industry. In a statement issued this week, the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association raised fresh concerns about the unauthorised use of news content by AI developers. It pointed to Article 30-4 of Japan’s Copyright Law, which permits the use of copyrighted material for machine learning without prior consent, provided the use does not “unreasonably prejudice the interests of the copyright owner.” But…
Platform accuses chatbot developer of breaching its terms and unfairly profiting from user-generated content. Reddit has filed a lawsuit against the AI firm Anthropic, accusing it of illegally scraping user comments to train its chatbot, Claude. The case, brought in California Superior Court, opens a new front in the growing legal battle against AI firms accused of harvesting online data without consent. According to the filing, Anthropic used automated bots to extract Reddit content in breach of the platform’s terms of use. Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, said AI developers must be held accountable for how they gather and…
South African newsroom rolls out new platform, Rev360, to deepen community ties and secure funding without paywall. Daily Maverick has launched a new initiative that uses artificial intelligence to strengthen its membership model and support independent journalism. The platform, called Revenue360 or Rev360, aims to increase reader contributions and improve engagement through a mix of...
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