FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Arlington, VA – Today the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law will hold a hearing at 2:00 p.m. ET, on “Oversight of A.I.: The Future of Journalism,” which will explore the impact of the growth of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) technology on publishers’ ability to provide high-quality journalism and possible oversight mechanisms to help protect and sustain quality journalism.

Witnesses scheduled to testify at the hearing include Danielle Coffey, President & CEO of the News/Media Alliance (written testimony here); Roger Lynch, CEO at Condé Nast (written testimony here); Curtis LeGeyt, President and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters (written testimony here); and author Jeff Jarvis (written testimony here).

Coffey’s comments before the Subcommittee will explain how Generative AI tools exploit news content to compete directly with publishers, yet need quality journalism to train their systems. Coffey will focus on the copyright infringement implications of how GAI developers train and use their models, as well as the need for legislation, including requiring transparency and responsibility from GAI developers, and passing the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA), which would allow publishers to collectively negotiate for fair compensation for use of their content by the dominant tech platforms, such as Meta and Google.

Since generative AI technology took off exponentially last year, the News/Media Alliance has been leading the call for AI companies to seek proper permissions and licensing from publishers for use of their valuable content. Last fall, the Alliance published a White Paper revealing that GAI systems copy massive amounts of publishers’ original works, almost always without authorization or compensation, and publisher content is overweighted in materials used for training these systems. The White Paper and comments the Alliance submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office also explain the legal implications of such use.

In response to the hearing, News/Media Alliance President & CEO, Danielle Coffey stated, “We commend Subcommittee Chair Richard Blumenthal and Ranking Member Josh Hawley and the Senate Judiciary Committee for recognizing the urgent need to address our very serious concerns about the impacts of AI technology on providers of quality journalism, as well as the legal questions this raises. AI companies are scraping our content to compete with it – usually without any compensation to, or permission from the publishers of that content – while they reap all the benefits. This is classic freeriding that infringes publishers’ copyrights and goes far beyond fair use.”

Coffey’s testimony offers multiple suggestions for policymakers, including:

• Recognizing that unauthorized use of publishers’ expressive content for commercial GAI training and development is likely to compete with and harm publisher businesses in a manner that infringes copyright;
• Creating transparency requirements to require the recordkeeping and disclosure of unauthorized training uses of material that is protected by copyright, by technical protection measures, or governed by contractual terms prohibiting scraping; and
• Adopting legislation to remedy existing market imbalances that prevent publishers from engaging in fair negotiations for the use of their content against dominant platforms.

A new report released by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in November found that the rate of newspaper closures has accelerated, now at 2.5 closures per week (with more than 130 confirmed newspaper closings or mergers in the last year), resulting in the expansion of news deserts, in which communities lack a source of local news.

Coffey concluded, “For years the tech platforms have gotten away with using publishers’ content without appropriate compensation. This problem, having gone unaddressed, has been getting worse and now, AI doubles down on the threat the largest tech platforms pose to publishers’ viability. Countries all over the world are introducing and passing legislation requiring the tech platforms to pay news publishers. The United States cannot fall behind other countries and should pass the JCPA, which will ensure publishers can continue to provide important high-quality journalism we all depend on. We have to act now before it’s too late.”

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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We are pleased that the Office has proposed a solution that can be quickly implemented and takes a pragmatic approach by accepting deposits of identifying material to evaluate for registration. It is imperative that digital news publishers can reasonably and functionally access the full benefits of the copyright system, including the statutory remedies for infringement of their content.

Today’s notice is an important step, but not the end, of the process. The News/Media Alliance looks forward to commenting on the proposal and for the Office to swiftly finalize the rule so that publishers can make use of this group option. Building on past successful consultations in connection with the 2018 group newspaper registration rule, we will continue working with the Office to ensure the registration program meets the needs of media publishers. We look forward to further improvements once the outdated computer registration system is eventually updated, and commit to helping educate news publishers so that they may avail themselves of this new group option and comply with its requirements.

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Alliance President and CEO Danielle Coffey stated, “The New York Times’s complaint demonstrates the value of quality journalism to AI developers. These companies repurpose and monetize news content, competing with the very industry they are benefiting from. Quality journalism and GenAI can complement each other if approached collaboratively, but using journalism without permission or payment is unlawful, and certainly not fair use.”

In a White Paper released in October, an analysis commissioned by the Alliance found that there is heavy reliance on journalistic and creative content by AI training models along with verbatim text from articles found in AI outputs.  The findings support a legal claim, parallel to the same findings asserted in The New York Times’s complaint.

Coffey continued, “The value of quality journalism has been debated for years.  We are at a point where the question is not whether quality journalism should be compensated, rather a question of how much.  In the case of AI, copyright protected content used without authorization should be a priority in releasing these technologies to the public so that responsible innovation can live alongside responsible reporting.”

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The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news, magazine, and digital media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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Reports indicate meaningful monetary value is at stake and a willingness to limit license on display that comes with attribution commitments.

Coffey continued, “We represent the industry and are working on an option available to all publishers in a way that makes sense and provides equity and fairness. OpenAI is doing the right thing to ensure technology and quality journalism exist and thrive in harmony. Our members are exploring all options, and we are ensuring no one is left behind.”

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The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news, magazine, and digital media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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The News/Media Alliance, which merged with MPA – The Association of Magazine Media in July 2022 – works with its members to advance news and magazine industry priorities through advocacy, critical research, resources and events that demonstrate the value and importance of supporting and preserving a free and independent press.

“We are delighted to welcome these 16 news, magazine, and digital media organizations to the Alliance family, and we are grateful for their support and their recognition of the need to share a voice on important issues facing the industry,” stated News/Media Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey. “The support of these innovative, multimedia businesses are invaluable as we continue to advocate on behalf of the industry and fight for the future of journalistic and creative content.”

The need to support and sustain quality journalism has reached a new level of urgency this year, as the rapid adoption of generative AI has introduced yet another threat to publishers of original content. The Alliance published a White Paper in October that found AI companies significantly overweight publisher content in their crawling of the web – often while not paying the publishers who invested in producing that content – to train their generative AI systems, coming in direct competition with publishers, as well as infringing on publishers’ copyrights.

The Alliance continues to push for legislation to require Big Tech platforms such as Meta and Google to pay publishers for the use of their content, with the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) being reintroduced in the Senate earlier this year. Canada recently passed similar legislation, which is modeled after the law in Australia that has been extremely successful, and the California State Assembly introduced a state journalism compensation bill that was the subject of a Senate informational hearing last week.

In addition, the News/Media Alliance works on behalf of its members to advocate on press freedom/First Amendment issues, privacy, digital advertising, copyright, postal delivery and more.

New News/Media Alliance members in 2023 include (not a complete list):

• AlterNet
• American Craft Council
• California Broker Magazine
• The Economist
• Future PLC
• G/O Media Inc.
• Grandstand Publishing LLC
• The Guardian
• Hughes Media Corp.
• Raptive
• Raw Story
• Rookie Road
• Style Media Group Inc.
• Today Media Inc.
• Ziff Davis

Coffey continued, “We look forward to working with our new members and all of membership to move forward key legislative and policy initiatives and demonstrate the importance and need for high-quality content in an information-driven world.”

For more information about membership in the News/Media Alliance, please click here.

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The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news, magazine and digital media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Arlington, VA – Today the California Senate Judiciary Committee will hold an Informational Hearing on “The Importance of Journalism in the Digital Age.” Senator Tom Umberg is holding the Hearing to give California legislators the opportunity to learn more about the state of journalism in the state, the challenges local newsrooms face and potential solutions, and how the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA, AB 886) in particular can help support a vibrant free press.

The CJPA would require Big Tech platforms such as Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Google to pay news publishers a “journalism usage fee” to use the content of eligible digital journalism providers, as defined in the bill. Currently, creators of journalistic and creative content are not adequately compensated for the use of their work that takes a tremendous investment to produce.

The CJPA was introduced by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) in March and passed out of the California State Assembly in June in a floor vote of 46-6 before it was held over to the next session. The Informational Hearing will provide legislators the opportunity to ask questions and provide input before the bill is brought up early in the next session in 2024.

“We applaud Assemblymember Wicks and Senator Umberg for their commitment to sustaining journalism and their dedication to the California Journalism & Preservation Act (CJPA),” said News/Media Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey. “By holding this informational hearing and having an open dialogue, they are showing their ardent commitment to preserving quality local journalism that supports a healthy democracy and providing their constituents with important information about their communities. Without meaningful action, news outlets will continue to disappear.”

News outlets, especially small, local ones, are shuttering at alarming rates as revenues decline and costs rise. California has lost more than 100 newspapers in the last decade.

A new report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University last month raised the level of urgency surrounding the local news crisis, finding that one-third of the newspapers in the U.S. in 2005 will be gone by 2024. Previous reports had estimated the timeline to reach that milestone would occur in 2025, which indicates that the pace of closures has accelerated. Most of the communities that lose their local newspaper do not get a replacement or have a digital source for local news for their community.

When local newspapers shutter, there is a significant detrimental effect on communities whereby civic engagement goes down, corruption goes up, and the ability to combat disinformation grows increasingly difficult.

When newsrooms are full, the public reaps the rewards. The CJPA would also promote the hiring of more journalists, requiring news publishers to invest 70 percent of the profits from the usage fee into journalism jobs.

The News/Media Alliance has been vocally advocating for legislation at the federal level since 2018. The Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA), which was reintroduced by Antitrust Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Senator John N. Kennedy (R-LA) on March 31 (S. 1094), passed through Senate Judiciary Committee markup in June.

The dominant tech platforms have become de facto gatekeepers of journalism, setting rules for how news content is displayed, prioritized, and monetized. They reap the majority of the financial benefits of sharing publishers’ original content without incurring any of the costs of gathering and reporting news their users want and rely on. The CJPA and JCPA directly address these challenges and are a crucial part of the solution to preserving local journalism.

Coffey added, “With similar laws being passed around the world, we are seeing more and more support for getting this legislation passed countrywide. We must act now to protect and support publishers of high-quality journalism, who work tirelessly to keep our communities safe and informed through their reporting. We look forward to the CJPA moving to a Senate vote next year and working with policymakers in California to implement the CJPA and restore fairness and balance to the marketplace.”

For more information on the federal JCPA, visit www.JCPABill.com.

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Media contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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Arlington, VA – Hundreds of millions of adults read news and magazine media each week. That finding and many others can be found in the newly released News/Media Alliance 2023 Market Report: News and Magazine Media: Providing a Trusted, Brand Safe Source for Reaching Engaged & Influential Audiences. The Market Report provides useful facts and figures on the news and magazine media audience and related benefits and advantages for marketers of advertising in print and digital news and magazine media.

A key overall finding of the Market Report is that the inherent value of the news and magazine media audience itself continues to be a huge benefit for advertisers due to their socioeconomic profile and strong purchasing history in several retail categories.

The report highlights the unique qualities of news and magazine media for advertisers, including a brand-safe environment; audience trust in and engagement with the advertising found in their products; a wealthier, more-educated audience than the average U.S. adult; news media reach of more than 116 million U.S. adult consumers, including 44 percent of adults; and magazine media reach of 224 million Americans in 2023.

The Market Report details how news and magazine media provide the best advertising strategies and channels to reach the desired audience(s). The report looks at key demographics of the news and magazine audience, such as income and education, as well as their buying and spending habits and their role as influencers in society which, taken together, make them a must-reach audience for advertisers.

Alliance Vice President of Research & Insights, Rebecca Frank said, “We are excited to have this data to help us evolve the understanding of the value of news and magazine readers for advertisers, which we hope will sustain ad-supported media into the future.”

Today’s news and magazine companies are publishers of original content, providers of marketing services and experts on their readers and communities. Their solutions encompass a variety of customer-focused marketing solutions, from standard print and digital advertising to events, research and marketing services.

“Nowhere else can readers find the quality journalism and content that our members offer,” said Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey. “From sports to politics to recipes to games to breaking news to investigative journalism, news and magazine media provide that brand safe environment where marketers can feel confident that their ads will always appear alongside trusted and credible content.”

This is the first combined report on the unified news and magazine media industry under the News/Media Alliance, which last year merged with MPA, the Association of Magazine Media. Alliance members represent many of the largest and most renowned brands in the magazine and news publishing industries representing $45 billion in combined annual revenue.

The 66-page Market Report includes research and statistics from a wide range of sources, including MRI-Simmons, Nielsen Scarborough, Edelman Trust Barometer and more, which paint a comprehensive picture of the value of the news and magazine audience for advertisers.

Highlights from the 2023 Market Report include:

Reach:

• Our products reach hundreds of millions of Americans.
• Print and digital newspaper reach nearly half of all US adults (116 million or 44%)
  • 45% of adult men engage with news media weekly, 43% of adult women.
• The US magazine audience reached 223.6 million Americans in 2023 (print + digital)
  • 87% of US adults have read a magazine in the last 6 months.

Valuable Audiences:

• The news media audience is well-educated and high-income, with a median household income $8K higher than the national average.
  • News audiences who access news via web/apps/mobile are younger (half are under age 44) and even higher-earning individuals.
• Nearly 9 in 10 Americans of all age groups have read magazine media in the past 6 months, with numbers increasing as age decreases.
  • Black, Hispanic and LGBT Americans all read more print magazines per month than the U.S. average.

Trust:

• Traditional media sources are more trusted than owned and social media.
• Magazine readers are trusted by their communities and influence others’ purchases and make recommendations.
  • Readers prefer magazines to internet, TV and radio on the topics of healthcare, automotive, vacation, finance, and food.

Spending Habits:

• News media reach not only high-value consumers, but those who make high-end purchases.
  • News media reach 58% of households that own or lease a hybrid or electric car, 58% of households that own stocks, and 51% of shoppers who spent $2500 or more on internet purchases in the past year.
• Nearly 8 in 10 magazine readers who see an ad in their magazine take an action as a result.
  • One in four readers looked for more information about the product/service, and one in five visited the advertiser’s website.

The Market Report is available exclusively to Alliance members on its website here (member login required). Advertisers and other who are not Alliance members who are interested in obtaining a copy of the report can request it here.

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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Credit: patpitchaya / iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

This Q&A provides additional background information and answers to common questions about the News/Media Alliance 2023 Market Report: News and Magazine Media: Providing a Trusted, Brand Safe Source for Reaching Engaged & Influential Audiences.

Q: What is the Market Report and what does it contain?

A: The 2023 Market Report from the News/Media Alliance is a comprehensive research report that provides revealing facts and insights that help inform publishers and advertisers about the value of our members’ products.

The 2023 Report features newly published data about news and magazine media, including audience size and demographics, reader consumption behavior, shopping trends, and more. The report grew out of previous work done by the News/Media Alliance, specifically the News Advertising Panorama and Magazine Media Factbook (member login required).

Q: Who is the audience(s) for the Market Report?

A: The audience for the Market Report includes those working in or with the news and magazine industry, including in advertising, marketing, editorial, audience engagement, and other aspects of providing engaging content to readers. There are hundreds of useful data points in the Market Report to help you gain additional insight into who, what, when, where and why readers engage with news and magazine media, including ads.

Q: Why did you combine the separate news and magazine reports?

A: We know that all publishers – news and magazine outlets, print and digital – face similar challenges and can help one another to position themselves for success. As our organizations merged in 2022, we represent a unified industry working toward shared goals, and so moving forward, we will release the data in a combined Market Report.

However, the report still breaks out separately data that is specific to news or magazines.

Q: What are the main highlights of the Market Report?

A: We see the most important findings that members and advertisers alike can draw from the report as laddering to four larger categories:

1. Audience Size: News and magazine media reach hundreds of millions of Americans.

• Print and digital newspapers reach nearly half of all US adults (116 million, or 44 percent).
  • Forty-five percent of adult men and 43 percent of adult women engage with news media each week.
  • Magazines reached 223.6 million Americans in 2023 (print + digital).
    • Eighty-seven percent of U.S. adults have read a magazine in the last six months.

2. Audience readership composition + demographic info: News and magazine media reach a wide group of valuable consumers.

• The news media audience is well-educated and higher income, with a median household income that is $8,000 higher than the national average.
  • News audiences who access news via web, apps, and mobile are younger (half are under age 44) and even higher earning.
• Magazines reach an engaged audience of young and diverse consumers.
  • Eighty-seven percent of white adults, 88 percent of Hispanic adults, 89 percent of Black adults, 91 percent of LGBT adults and 92 percent of Asian-American adults read magazines in the past six months.
  • Eighty-nine percent of Americans under age 35 and 90 percent under age 25 also read magazines in the past six months.

3. Opportunities for advertisers: News and magazine media reach people looking to make big ticket purchases and who take action on information they get from news and magazines.

• News media reach not only high-value consumers, but those who make high-end purchases.
  • News media reach 58 percent of households that own or lease a hybrid or electric car, 58 percent of households that own stocks, and 51 percent of shoppers who spent $2,500 or more on internet purchases in the past year.
  • Nearly eight in 10 magazine readers who see an ad in their magazine take an action as a result.
  • One in four readers looked for more information about the product/service, and one in five visited the advertiser’s website.

4. Trust: News and magazine publishers earn readers’ trust and they share our products with their friends and families.

• Traditional media sources are more trusted than owned and social media.
• Magazine readers are trusted by their communities and influence others’ purchases and make recommendations.
  • Readers prefer magazines to internet, TV and radio on the topics of healthcare, automotive, vacation, finance, and food.

Q: What else can I expect in the Market Report?

A: Other data in the Market Report include: Information about audience size and growth, reader demographics, purchase and spending behaviors, voting behavior, perceptions of news and magazine products, reader trust in news and magazine media, including ads; opinions about advertising fit with news and magazine content; and actions taken after seeing ads in news and magazine media.

Q: Where did the data come from?

A: Data and statistics in the 2023 Report came from some of the most trusted research companies in the field, including Nielsen Scarborough, MRI-Simmons/GfK, and Edelman.

Q: How can people use the Market Report?

A: Our vision for the Market Report and its predecessors has always been to inform any and all activities that publishers are using to help sustain their businesses. Examples include developing presentations and Media Kits for advertisers, developing new local outreach strategies, and refining advertising client targets based on these data points.

Q: Can I use content straight from the Market Report in my own presentations, and do I have to get permission first?

A: Yes! Members can use full slides or certain charts and graphs from the Market Report within presentations and in internal and external communications. We just ask that you attribute the information to “News/Media Alliance, 2023 Market Report, November 2023.” You do not have to get formal permission first.

Related Articles:

Press release: New Market Report from News/Media Alliance Provides Trends, Insights on Valuable News & Magazine Audience for Advertisers

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Arlington, VA – Today News/Media Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey is attending as an invited participant in a bipartisan forum hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on “AI – Transparency, Explainability, Intellectual Property, & Copyright.”

This is the seventh AI Insight Forum that seeks to further innovation and develop bipartisan artificial intelligence legislation that takes the opportunities as well as the threats of AI technology into account. Also participating in the forum are 19 leaders from various industries, including the news media, entertainment, and tech industries.

Today’s Forum focuses on two key areas of AI policy: 1) transparency and explainability and 2) intellectual property and copyright, including addressing concerns around the use of copyrighted content in training and prompting. These are the most vital artificial intelligence concerns for the Alliance’s members.

In addition to a written statement provided in advance of the Forum, Coffey will provide oral remarks sharing the unique perspective of the news and magazine industry.

Coffey stated, “I am honored to be invited by Majority Leader Schumer, Senator Rounds, Senator Heinrich, and Senator Young to participate in this AI forum and I look forward to the dialogue. This is a critical time in the evolution of AI technology, and it is important to strike the right balance of creativity, innovation, regulation, and respect for existing rights. We must ensure that publishers of high-quality journalism whose content is being used to train AI systems have a seat at the table.”

The Alliance – whose members comprise over 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the U.S. and globally – has been leading the call since the advent of generative AI chatbots earlier this year for AI companies and developers to properly compensate publishers of quality journalism for use of their valuable content to train generative AI systems (GAI).

In April, the Alliance released AI Principles for the news and magazine media industry, which highlight the overarching principles that must guide the development and use of GAI systems as well as the policies and regulations governing them. Among other things, the AI Principles outline the need for GAI developers to obtain explicit permission for use of publishers’ intellectual property, and for publishers to be able to negotiate for fair compensation for use of their IP by these developers. In addition, the Alliance helped organize the publication of Global AI Principles in September, endorsed by 31 organizations representing thousands of creative professionals around the world, including news, entertainment, magazine, and book publishing companies and the academic publishing sector.

On October 31, the Alliance released a White Paper entitled, “How the Pervasive Copying of Expressive Works to Train and Fuel Generative Artificial Intelligence Systems Is Copyright Infringement And Not a Fair Use,” which shows that GAI systems have been developed by copying massive amounts of the expressive material published by the Alliance’s members, almost always without authorization or compensation, to create new products and services that frequently compete with Alliance member publishers.

The Alliance also recently submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on the use of publisher content to power generative artificial intelligence technologies (GAI). The comments, White Paper and accompanying technical analysis together document the pervasive, unauthorized use of publisher content by GAI developers, the impact this may have on the sustainability and availability of high-quality original content, and the legal implications of such use.

The Copyright Office comments and the White Paper offer multiple recommendations to policymakers, including recognizing that unauthorized use of publishers’ expressive content for commercial GAI training and development is likely to compete with and harm publisher businesses in a manner that infringes copyright; creating transparency requirements to require disclosure of the use of copyright protected content in training; encouraging and facilitating effective licensing solutions; supporting international cooperation and harmonization on GAI regulations; and adopting legislation to remedy existing market imbalances that prevent publishers from engaging in fair negotiations for the use of their content against dominant platforms.

Coffey added, “For years the Big Tech platforms have gotten away with using our publishers’ content to add billions to their bottom lines, all while publishers have suffered. Now, the platforms and AI companies are scraping publisher content and using it to train their generative AI systems – again without compensating publishers. This goes far beyond fair use. Journalists, writers, publishers, and other creators make the investments and take the risks while generative AI developers reap the rewards of traffic, data, brand creation, subscription fees, and advertising dollars. This is freeriding, and it is antithetical to established copyright law and the public interest that it serves.”

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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Arlington, VA – Yesterday, the News/Media Alliance published a White Paper and a technical analysis and submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on the use of publisher content to power generative artificial intelligence technologies (GAI). Together, the three publications document the pervasive, unauthorized use of publisher content by GAI developers, the impact this may have on the sustainability and availability of high-quality original content, and the legal implications of such use. GAI systems have been developed by copying massive amounts of the expressive material published by the Alliance’s members, almost always without authorization or compensation, to create new products and services that frequently compete with Alliance member publishers.

The Alliance recognizes the exciting potential of GAI models and applications to improve aspects of our lives and supports the principled development of these systems. But this development must not come at the expense of publishers and journalists who invest considerable time and resources producing material that keeps our communities informed, safe, and entertained, and holds our government officials and other decision makers in check. The Alliance and its members would welcome working with GAI developers to help build and grow these technologies in a sustainable and responsible manner.

While the Copyright Office submission and White Paper discuss the wider publisher landscape in the face of the GAI revolution, including relevant principles of copyright law, the accompanying technical analysis documents the extent to which GAI developers rely on high-quality journalistic content to power their models. In particular, the results show:

• GAI developers have copied and used news, magazine and digital media content to train large language models (LLMs).
• Popular curated datasets underlying LLMs significantly overweight publisher content by a factor ranging from over 5 to almost 100 as compared to the generic collection of content that the well-known entity Common Crawl has scraped from the web.
• Other studies show that news and digital media ranks third among all categories of sources in Google’s C4 training set, which was used to develop Google’s GAI-powered products like Bard. Half of the top ten sites represented in the data set are news outlets.
• The LLMs also copy and use publisher content in their outputs. The LLMs can reproduce the content on which they were trained, demonstrating that the models retain and can memorize the expressive content of the training works.

Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey stated, “The research and analysis we’ve conducted shows that AI companies and developers are not only engaging in unauthorized copying of our members’ content to train their products, but they are using it pervasively and to a greater extent than other sources. This shows they recognize our unique value, and yet most of these developers are not obtaining proper permissions through licensing agreements or compensating publishers for the use of this content. This diminishment of high-quality, human created content harms not only publishers but the sustainability of AI models themselves and the availability of reliable, trustworthy information.”

The Copyright Office comments and the White Paper offer multiple recommendations to policymakers, including recognizing that unauthorized use of publishers’ expressive content for commercial GAI training and development is likely to compete with and harm publisher businesses in a manner that infringes copyright; creating transparency requirements to require disclosure of the use of copyright protected content in training; encouraging and facilitating effective licensing solutions; supporting international cooperation and harmonization on GAI regulations; and adopting legislation to remedy existing market imbalances that prevent publishers from engaging in fair negotiations for the use of their content against dominant platforms.

Coffey continued, “Generative AI systems should be held responsible and accountable, just like any other business. This White Paper demonstrates that these systems rely on journalistic and creative content, which have the benefit of investment in quality on the front end, as well as publishers who are required by law to take responsibility for the content they share with the public. Continued unauthorized use will harm existing markets that acknowledge the value of archived and real-time quality content, and over time the GAI models themselves will deteriorate. You get out what you put in. It is critical that our copyright protections are properly enforced and that high standards of quality and accountability are the foundation of these and other new technologies.”

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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