Journalism Financing Digest – July 2026
Welcome to DW Freedom's quarterly digest — a resource for media development professionals, policymakers, and journalists navigating the rapidly evolving intersection of Big Tech, AI, and the financing of public interest journalism.
In this July edition, the focus shifts to the practicalities of how to make AI companies pay for using journalistic content. There is debate on the technological infrastructure publishers would need to be able to bill Big Tech per crawl, while a "value of journalism" study has underpinned with hard evidence what societies stand to lose when public interest journalism and its business models are under threat.
Key themes in this edition:
- Media vs. Big Tech — navigating the power imbalance
- Tech as the solution? Building the tools to make AI companies pay
- Will the agents have credit cards? How to bill AI
- Taking Big Tech to court. News from the legal front
- A new relationship with Big Tech? Regulating AI
- Power, tech, and the future of our societies: Reporting on Big Tech
Media vs. Big Tech — navigating the power imbalance
Is Big Tech dealing with "stolen goods"? New York Times chief slams AI companies for their disregard of intellectual property. And a study underpins with hard evidence what we all always felt sure of: Public interest journalism has hard currency value for our societies.
Top reads
"Too quiet, too passive, too fragmented." New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger calls on journalists to stand up for their rights, lobby decision-makers and form coalitions against Big Tech. "Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work." (Nieman Lab,RFI and New York Times)
The facts speak for themselves — and for journalism, as well. A new evidence report titled "The Value of Journalism" shows that societies benefit from public interest journalism — by enabling economic development, supporting national security and improving the response to crises. Just two data points to whet your appetite: Declining press freedom in a country leads to an associated 1-2% reduction in real GDP growth. The more news audiences consume, the less likely they are to believe in disinformation. (DW Akademie)
"Same gatekeepers, new tollbooths." A study found "major problems with the current licensing market." AI companies are simultaneously eroding news media's web traffic and controlling the licensing market. The authors advocate for strengthening public interest journalism's negotiating power, e.g. through collective bargaining.
(Center for Media and Digital Governance,Nieman Lab)
Further reads
Journalism's love-hate relationship with Big Tech. A panel about journalism as a keystone species for the public, democracy and the AI systems. (Global Media Forum)
Five men control AI. Who should control them?
(The Economist Insider)
Sam Altman may control our future — can he be trusted?
(The New Yorker (paywall))
Google accepts need for new value exchange with publishers (PressGazette)
What Google AI mode push means for publishers
(PressGazette)
AI bots are now a significant source of web traffic
(Wired (paywall))
The capture of journalism and the illusion of objectivity
(Coda Story)
The Internet's most powerful archiving tool is in mortal peril. (PressGazette, Wired (paywall))
Tech as the solution? Building the tools to make AI companies pay
While it had seemed for a while as if big publishers were often striking individual deals with AI companies on licensing their content, now there is a move towards joining forces — not only for collective bargaining, but also to create industry standards for "responsible ways for original journalism to be used sustainably." Increasingly, the conversation is shifting to the practicalities of how to make Big Tech actually pay for journalistic content. And publishers want to be part of a technical solution, so they can shape the system of what to pay for.
Top reads
It will need more than just media outlets to defend public interest journalism against Big Tech: There is a whole ecosystem of tech startups, nonprofits and news publishers and coalitions evolving to tackle the issue of fair compensation. An article by the Reuters Institute compares the relationship of news media and AI companies to that of Napster and the music industry around the year 2000. Ultimately, AI companies will need public interest journalism to survive, is the optimistic note — for their own sake.
(Reuters Institute)
Some say the future of the internet belongs to bots. Are publishers ready? A session at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia discussed how open-protocol tools could give publishers more control over how their content is being reformatted by AI agents — including editorial tone and quotes. It also explored how they can defend their legal rights to compensation. See here for an article and here for the video to the session.
Permission-based access instead of uncontrolled scraping? The Indonesian Cyber Media Association AMSI has begun developing a locally governed AI and data-access solution. The technology aims to give publishers back control of their content. They determine which content they want to sell for which purpose and which price. AI companies can only submit queries (DW Freedom and GFMD). British media adopt a similar strategy: SPUR — the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition — aims to establish shared technical standards and a responsible licensing framework that ensure "responsible ways for original journalism to be used sustainably" by AI companies. The invitation to join the coalition is open to media around the globe. Other media are joining (BBC and Le Monde). One can hear Tow Center's Emily Bell's sigh of relief when she writes: "To survive the AI age, publishers are finally working together."
(CJR)
UK publishers plan to make AI pay for scraping their content: The Movement for an Open Web has developed additions to legal terms of website use that are aimed at making robots.txt files more powerful. Under those terms, unauthorized scraping of website content would be billed with £500 per article. The hope: "The new system makes it easy for publishers to lodge small legal claims over unwanted scraping," writes PressGazette.
A technical solution, but at a cost. Cloudflare launched a "pay-per-crawl" marketplace last year where publishers can charge AI crawlers a small fee (althoughCloudfare is estimated to take a 30% cut of the earnings). This could help create a licensing market, finds a whitepaper. In June, the company announced a deal with the newsletter platform Beehiiv, enabling creators to block AI crawlers. (Nieman Lab)
Further reads
Weaving a common vision a dialogue on how to strengthen media's bargaining power over generative AI and safeguard democracy (The Data Tank)
Is it hypocritical for news publishers to complain about tech companies' platforms — but still be on them? (Nieman Journalism Lab)
Will the agents have credit cards? How to bill AI
The specter of an internet harvested by AI agents on behalf of the people media used to call their audiences is becoming more concrete. What does that mean for the business models of public interest media?
Top reads
"We are moving from a web built around navigation and clicks toward an agentic ecosystem built around delegation, context and orchestration," argues Ezra Eeman. This has impacts on audience journeys, monetization, newsroom operations, and trust. (See here and his talk here.)
AI will revolutionize journalism's ecosystem. Agentic AI killing news media's already shaky business models was at the center of the Nordic AI in Media Summit. The conference speakers agreed: It is time to radically reimagine their business models for public interest media to survive. (Reuters Institute)
The time to reinvent is now, even at the risk of cannibalizing one's own existing business models, Canadian AI expert Nikita Roy advocated at the conference. AI is threatening traditional containers for journalism from website to podcast. Media houses need to cater to human users as well as AI agents. With agents customizing content, the fight for the audience's attention turns into a competition for its intention: What do users send their agents out to look for? (Watch her talk here and check out the other talks as well. Read also this Reuters Institute report on the implication of AI chatbots on the news business.)
Further reads
Sam Altman backs micropayment model for AI agents to compensate publishers (Nieman Lab)
The click is dying. What pays next? (Substack)
Six provocations about AI in news (Substack)
Are human journalists truly irreplaceable? How to safeguard public interest journalism in the age of AI (Reuters Institute)
Where did the money go? A conversation about the funding crisis and rebuilding journalism
(International Journalism Festival)
National journalism funds: The new center of gravity of journalism funding (International Journalism Festival)
Hyperlocal AI with a Million Subscribers (CJR)
Future Newsrooms Study 2026 by FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA
Beyond the paywall: Innovative new business models from around the globe (session at the Global Media Forum in Bonn)
Taking Big Tech to court: News from the legal front
Publishers are mounting legal actions against the scraping of their content. One pending question: Is current copyright law strong enough for the age of AI?
Top reads
A coalition that owns 400 local US newspapers is suing OpenAI and Microsoft. Their ask to the court: To determine what their reporting is worth to AI companies. After all, no AI agent attends local meetings in their communities. (TNW)
AI firms might be liable for AI speech. A German regional court found Google liable for false claims in its AI overviews. Unlike search results, which have been protected from direct liability by the search engines, the court found that AI content provided "additional function." The court also bluntly dismissed Google's argument that "information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted." Google will likely appeal the decision. (Read up here and here and here for further comment.)
Is copyright law fit for the age of AI? This is to be decided by the Court of Justice of the EU in a lawsuit filed by the Hungary publisher Like company vs Google. The underlying question. Does current copyright law cover the output of AI chat bots and their previous training as reproduced content is often altered by the AI, and thus not always identifiable as such. Read up here.
For overviews over deals between media and AI companies and pending lawsuits see here and here.
A new relationship with Big Tech? Regulating AI
From responsibility to hard payments: Regulating Big Tech seems to gain a bit of momentum. Brazil adopted landmark decrees making social media platforms responsible for the content published on them. In Europe, the EU Court of Justice ruled: Regulation can force Big Tech to pay for journalistic content.
Top reads
On May 21, Brazil's new platform regulation decrees come into power, strengthening platform obligations and introducing enhanced online protections for women. In this exclusive DW Freedom interview, former Deputy Secretary for Digital Policies Nina Santos explains the thinking behind Brazil's approach, how the government sought to balance platform accountability with freedom of expression, and why she believes the country's regulatory framework is still incomplete.
On April 24, Ghana launched its national AI strategy. The broadness of the areas covered shows that the country understands AI not merely as an economic or technological question, but as a societal one. With relevance for journalism, the strategy includes aspects such as AI in local languages and copyright law. Its guiding question according to one analysis: "How do we use AI well?" (See here for more analysis and here for the strategy itself.)
The promise and limits of African data sovereignty. African data protection regulation — no matter how well-designed — ends at the US border when it comes to Big Tech, this opinion piece argues. The two authors advocate for a continent-wide approach, binding Big Tech to African legislation and prohibiting the transfer of sensitive data to US servers.
A landmark court case lost by Big Tech: The EU Court of Justice ruled that Meta must compensate publishers for excerpts of the content displayed on Facebook and Instagram, as established by the Italian implementation of the EU's Digital Single Market directive. This means that publishers deserve their fair share — according to metrics such as views, clicks and advertising revenue. The ruling could inspire other member states to tighten their regulatory frameworks. (Check here for an overview of the case, and here for an analysis of its potential impact.)
How to ensure authors can survive in the age of AI? Scientists at the German Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition advocate for a new remuneration model for authors and fee for journalism: A levy for AI companies could be distributed among authors, regardless of the use of their works. A fee for journalism, similar to the public broadcasting fee, could strengthen public interest media. (See report here.)
Further reads
What 19th-century media can tell us about the future (CJR)
The British government wants to force more trustworthy news into your doomscrolling
(Nieman Lab)
Europe must make AI firms pay for training data to save journalism (Project Syndicate)
Power, tech, and the future of our societies: Reporting on Big Tech
Reporting about tech has long ceased to be relevant only for tech nerds and computer freaks. Big Tech is shaping how our societies communicate and how our economies function. Watch these two panels from Perugia's International Journalism Festival.
"So you want to report on the tech industry but aren't a tech reporter?"
(International Journalism Festival)
"Uncovering Big Tech's sphere of influence."
(International Journalism Festival)
