• by Joe Mandese , 7 hours ago

A little more than two decades ago, then NBCUniversal chief Jeff Zucker famously quipped how search engines were replacing news publishers' "analog dollars" with "digital pennies." Twenty-one years later they are becoming AI half-pennies.

Unlike the mid- to-late-aughts when a spate of litigation -- mostly initiated by European news agencies -- settled for small amounts and ultimately paved the way for publishers to technically opt-out of search indexes, AI-generated summaries and overviews have had a profound "zero-click" impact on monetizable traffic to all websites, but especially to news publishers.

The oft-cited stats range from a 34% to a 58% reduction in the volume of news site click-throughs since the emergence of AI chatbots and answer engines, but let's just say it has been 50% for back-of-the-envelope sake.

Not surprisingly, news publishers have stepped up their legal claims, including at least three major suits:

• The New York Times vs. Open AI/Microsoft

• Bartz vs. Anthropic

• News Corp. vs. Brave Software

News Corp. late Tuesday responded to Brave's March 2025 complaint with a detailed counter-claim citing ample examples of unauthorized news summaries published by Brave.

You can read News Corp.'s counter-claim in detail here, but you can see examples of Brave's marketing and a news summary from suit below.

I'm no expert on digital copyright law -- much less AI copyright law -- but it seems to me that news publishers have more of a leg to stand on now than they did at the time of Zucker's original penny-for-your-thoughts observation.

Yes, publishers could technically opt out of search indexing back then, but if they did, they risked losing relevance altogether as new generations of news consumers discovered their content via search -- and ultimately social media platforms over time.

The same catch-22 is true today with AI search and answer engines, but this one could be a death blow for authentic journalism altogether. It's not just that half of all news-based information is being accessed and digested via AI bypass, it's that the AI engines may or may not be rendering that information in a relevant context -- or even worse, may be contextually misrepresenting it due to the distortion of AI logic and/or hallucinations.

Those are much bigger fish for society to fry, and given the current policies -- or really, lack thereof -- by regulators or even industry self-regulatory groups, I don't see a consensus forming around that anytime soon.

But to create a new economic demonetization for news publishers now, more than ever, could be a final blow for the Fourth Estate.