• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, January 19, 2025

Artificial intelligence is an existential threat to the news business, claims Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance.

“Journalistic work involves significant investment in fact checking, vetting, and human curation – elements we believe are essential for producing reliable information,” Coffey contends in an interview with DW Freedom. 

Yet that work is undone when generative AI can simply scrape content without paying for it. 

The threat is especially acute when it comes to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

"RAG is particularly concerning for publishers because it pulls real-time, up-to-date content to generate responses," Coffey argues. “This means it uses today's articles and breaking news that were created through journalists' hard work to uncover and report time-sensitive events. By extracting and repurposing this valuable content for the same audience, it puts us in direct competition, often without offering any recognition or return to the original publishers.”

Coffey adds: “There's no business model for us in such a scenario, and I believe this is what makes it an existential crisis for journalism.”

It's difficult to argue with that. But what about the licensing deals publishers are making with Gen AI companies?

“I think it's a step forward,” Coffey says. “However, and this is a big ‘however,’ there's nothing better than having sustainable legal rights. The current business arrangements don't reflect fair market value because, by definition, a market is suppressed when there is uncertainty.”

However, these deals show there is a market for this content. And Coffey is hopeful going forward. 

"If the unauthorized scraping by AI companies is deemed 'fair use,' that market would vanish. Publishers would never be paid, and a court would have to decide that this market harm — meaning the evisceration of our industry — is acceptable," she says. "I think that would be a difficult conclusion for a judge to reach, especially given the constitutional importance of a free press in the US. So, I'm optimistic that the courts will eventually rule in our favor.”