The press isn’t being compensated for the use of our information by tech companies. They are taking it without permission and without paying a cent.
Case in point:
I did a search in Grok just to see what it would do, looking for an article that I had recently written. Instead of recognizing copyright and directing me to the website where it was published, Grok provided the entire text of the article right there. I checked ChatGBT. Same thing.
I was flabbergasted.
Then I did a search on Google for an item I had written. While the AI summary credited me and the newspaper by name, in the entire AI summary, it did not once provide a link back to our newspaper website.
I was shocked.
And it explains why digital traffic to 100 of the largest local newspapers’ websites plummeted 50% in the past four years, as observed in the Medill State of Local News Report 2026.
Here at the Monitor, Messenger and Southwest Voices, we work hard at providing locally written articles that you won’t find elsewhere (unless they picked up on what we did first). So, it’s frustrating to see that others are taking our content, using it to populate their “answers,” and selling ads off it. They’re making a fortune and the entity where the content originated isn’t getting a dime. We’re paying people to create the solid content, and they’re making money off it.
It sure doesn’t seem right.
And the irony is this: The AI summaries and answers are only as good as the news that they are pulling from publisher websites. If the publisher websites go away, so does the AI.
Zach Metzger, director of Medill’s State of Local News Project, identified this fundamental contradiction in the emerging AI ecosystem during an Editor and Publisher podcast. “If they put the news publishers out of business, they’re not gonna have any news to draw from,” Metzger said.
Media companies are pushing back.
I appreciate what The Seattle Times Editor Brier Dudley had to say about things in a recent column:
The New York Times blazed the trail, spending more than $28 million since 2023 on its copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. Dailies owned by Alden Global Capital sued them in 2024. This summer, a new lawsuit was filed by 35 publishers operating around 400 small, community newspapers.
Their suit said the papers spent decades “investing in journalists, editors and infrastructure required to produce the trusted, original reporting on which their communities depend.”
“Without permission and without any compensation to the publishers, defendants scraped, copied and ingested that content to build and commercialize their generative artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot.”
Zack Richner of Richner Communications, a family-owned, Long Island publishing group and lead plaintiff, said publishers “are not anti-innovation or anti-progress” and believe AI tools may help journalists do their jobs.
“The rub is that those tools were built on the backs of our workers … and built up these trillion-dollar companies and we don’t see any of the fruits of that labor,” he said. “Somebody else is seeing the fruits of that labor and we just want it to be shared fairly.”
Plaintiff Jeremy Gulban of CherryRoad Media, a New Jersey tech entrepreneur who began acquiring newspapers in 2020 including some in Minnesota, pointed out that AI companies are seemingly “going to be the ones that are monetizing the content, even though they’re not creating it.”
He added, “This technology could change the world, I don’t think there’s any question about that,” he said. “But it’s got to be done in a manner that preserves the intellectual property rights of people who write things for a living.”
I wholeheartedly agree.
If you do, please talk to your legislators about it. And keep it in mind as you use AI tools.
Meanwhile, I’m joining others to file official US copyright registrations for our work, and pursue licensing deals. Free papers like ours are getting hit especially hard. Our content is free to read so it is easy to scrape. But free to read was never free to copy, and the companies building billion dollar products on our work know that.
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