How The Generative AI Boom Proves We Need Journalism

Danielle Coffey, CEO and president of the News/Media Alliance, believes journalism and generative AI can play nice.

But first, generative AI companies must get real about the value journalism brings to their products.

“This doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game,” Coffey told AdExchanger. “These innovative technologies are very promising, but it doesn’t have to be at the expense of journalism.”

AI companies acknowledge the value of journalism, Coffey said… So, she argued, they should look at working with journalists as part of the cost of doing business – similar to how Netflix or Spotify compensate content creators for their IP.

Click here to read the rest of the Q&A on AdExchanger‘s website.

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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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The below Q&A is from an interview with News/Media Alliance Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Danielle Coffey, published in the February 2023 edition of Editor & Publisher Magazine. The original article is available here.

Q: In what ways have copyright laws and compliance become more complicated in the digital, social media age?

A: There are two sides to this question. First, digital transformation has led to a proliferation in the availability of news sources and content for journalists and publishers, as well as the number of middlemen that publishers have to deal with regularly. As a result, publishers must pay more attention to due diligence — ensuring that they understand the relationships between the original copyright owner and any platforms or middlemen they may use and that they have the necessary rights to any content they publish.

For example, many publishers have recently struggled with the legal uncertainty around using embedded content on Instagram without explicit authorization from the original poster. Related to this, the increased availability of photos and videos taken by amateurs during news events — especially fast-moving ones where time is of the essence — raises important questions on how to acquire the necessary licenses while remaining on top of the newsworthy situation. These conditions require publishers to pay particular attention to ensuring they comply with applicable copyright laws.

Second, the digital age has also made it more complicated for publishers to protect their content against unauthorized uses. These uses range from the overly-expansive use of news content by search and social media platforms, which the Alliance has advocated against at length, to the use of news content for AI training purposes, to the unlawful posting of full-text articles on services often based abroad, often within minutes of publication, threatening the original publishers’ ability to benefit from subscription and digital advertising revenues. These uses are often systematic, and the infringers are hard to detect and locate, making enforcing copyright laws difficult, time-consuming and expensive.

Q: How have U.S. copyright laws and protections been challenged in the courts in recent years? Are there particular cases that news publishers should be familiar with — or concerned about?

A: There have been a few cases in the last five years with implications for news publishers, with some of the most important being Fox News Network v. TVEyes (2018), Goldman v. Breitbart (2018), and Warhol v. Goldsmith (ongoing).

TVEyes concerned a service that copied broadcasts from over 1,400 TV and radio stations and allowed its subscribers to search, download, watch and share clips of these programs. The District Court had found that both the search function and the watch function were fair use. Fox appealed the decision as it related to the watch function, and the Circuit Court reversed, finding the fourth fair use factor — related to potential market harm — decisive. This was a key victory for rightsholders, with the Court correctly noting that the market effect on the copyright owner should be a major factor in fair use analysis and giving leverage to the argument that even the use of clips of protected content can hurt the copyright owner and should be subject to serious scrutiny.

Meanwhile, Goldman focused on publishers’ ability to embed third-party content from social media. Specifically, the defendants had embedded a tweet with the plaintiff’s photograph of Tom Brady without the original poster’s authorization. Rejecting the Ninth Circuit’s “server test,” the Second Circuit agreed with Goldman, finding that the embedding violated his exclusive rights despite the image being hosted on a third-party server. Similar questions have since arisen in other cases, often concerning Instagram — which recently introduced an option to opt-out of embedding following discussions with the News/Media Alliance — with one publisher settling a case brought by a photographer in New York and Instagram managing to squash a class-action lawsuit against itself related to its embedding function in California. This remains an important debate for publishers to follow.

Lastly, we’re also eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision on Warhol, which concerns Andy Warhol’s paintings of Prince, based on a portrait taken by photographer Lynn Goldsmith for Vanity Fair before Prince became famous. Following Prince’s death, Goldsmith discovered that Warhol had made a whole series of paintings based on the photo without her permission. The case raises important questions about what amounts to “transformative use” within fair use analysis. The Alliance submitted an amicus brief in support of neither party, outlining some of the delicate considerations the case raises, including how an overly broad definition of “transformative use” could threaten the copied work right. The Court heard oral arguments in the case this past October, with the decision due this spring.

Q: Copyright was at the heart of the news publisher v. Big Tech negotiations in Europe. Can you share a synopsis of those negotiations and where things stand in Europe? Also, help us wrap some context around what’s happened in Europe and what it may mean for news publishers here in the States.

A: The European Union’s adoption in 2019 of its Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, including Article 15, which requires member states to create a so-called “Publishers’ Right,” was a landmark development. It acknowledged the inability of publishers to effectively protect their content online against unauthorized uses by online platforms and provided publishers with an independent right to do so. In France, the first country to implement Article 15 in national law, publishers soon encountered problems negotiating with Google. In 2019, soon after the law’s adoption, Google refused to pay publishers and indicated it would stop showing excerpts in search results unless a publisher waived its right to compensation. Following a challenge by French publishers, the French competition authority issued an interim ruling, finding that Google likely engaged in anticompetitive behavior and required Google to engage in negotiations. While Google engaged in negotiations and reached some deals after the decision, the French competition watchdog issued a €500 million fine against Google a year later for failing to comply with the orders on conducting such negotiations. Following this fine, Google proposed commitments in early 2022 to change its practices and to resolve the investigation into its anticompetitive practices. The competition authority accepted Google’s commitments in June, with Google expected to negotiate with a broader selection of publishers in good faith.

From the publishers’ viewpoint in the United States, Europe established a precedent that Australia improved upon. The Alliance has embraced a model similar to Australia based on competition law, where the anticompetitive conduct and power of the monopolies are more squarely addressed. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, considered by Congress during the last session, would have adopted a similar approach in the U.S. to the Australian model, while Canada, the UK, and India are also considering similar approaches. All of the approaches attempt to address the disparities in the digital ecosystem that allow dominant online platforms not only to set the rules of the game but to reap the vast majority of rewards. Publishers need more leverage to negotiate fairer terms and compensation that help preserve high-quality journalism for future generations.

Q: Is the News/Media Alliance engaged in lobbying Congress for any changes to copyright law or protections granted to news publishers?

A: In comments submitted with the Copyright Office, the Alliance recommended that Congress explore a sui generis, or quasi-property right, that would recognize an exchange of value outside of the fair use factors but within copyright law. We are also actively advocating for changes that would allow publishers to register dynamic web content, which is currently impossible. This would significantly affect the publishers’ ability to register and protect their content online effectively.

Q: Who, typically or ideally, should be concerned with or tasked with copyright compliance at the news publisher?

A: This depends a lot on the type and size of the publication, with no easy one-size-fits-all answer. Some large publishers may have whole teams responsible for ensuring compliance with various laws, including copyright, while smaller outlets may rely on an individual person, such as an image editor. The most important thing is that whoever is responsible for compliance takes their job seriously, has the time and resources to do so properly, and has the authority to affect publishing decisions.

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