Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 17 August.
❌ Cloudflare is one of the big beasts of the internet world and is on a mission to crack some heads together in the AI scraping world.
I spoke to chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen about the thinking behind its pay-per-crawl and now pay-per-use plans and why its efforts to block AI bots are following through on helping publishers make licensing deals (with outcomes vouched for by People Inc CEO Neil Vogel).
At Press Gazette’s AI Summit in London in June, we heard concerns that blocking the bots doesn’t always functionally mean blocking the bots - as there are so many ways for them to get through without you explicitly letting them.
I put that to Stephanie and she was insistent that Cloudflare’s blocks are clever and effective, and if publishers are getting scraped they may have leaky buckets elsewhere (for example by syndicating content to other websites that allow the bots).
I’d be interested to hear if this rings true for our newsletter readers. Feel free to drop me a line with your response to this story on charlotte.tobitt@pressgazette.co.uk.
👩⚕️Press Gazette has previously reported on how health coverage is the publisher topic most vulnerable to losing traffic as a result of Google AI Overviews and the rise of ‘zero-click’ searches.
We have now confirmed this is also directly impacting charities that look after people in their worst times. Several health charities told us website traffic had fallen as people got information from AI answers instead of their trusted, accurate pages.
The encouraging thing, however, is that people appear to still be seeking out other humans via forums and other engagement-led pages, and that donations continue to come through. Once people have worked out what they need, they arrive at charity websites with a clear purpose in mind so hopefully it really is just eliminating that first-level query.
🗣️ Finally, it’s less than a month until our biggest annual gathering, the Future of Media Technology Conference, kicks off in London.
We’ve now announced a whole raft of speakers led by Financial Times CEO Jon Slade as keynote speaker.
The Times, The Guardian, The Economist, BBC Studios, the Daily Mail, Conde Nast, Politico UK and Hello! Magazine are among the newsbrands that will be represented on stage.
Find out more, including how to get tickets, here.
The stories that matter break locally first, in local publications, in local languages, days before they reach the wires. Journalist.net gives you access to both halves of that: the coverage and the people.
The monitoring tracks 150,000+ publications across 100+ languages in real time. Set it on the regions and topics you cover and you see stories forming in the regional press while everyone else is waiting on the wire. That alone is the edge.
The other half is who you call next. Eleven thousand verified, insured news professionals across 180 countries, searchable by location, language, beat, and format. A reporter in Jakarta who knows the ministry. A fixer in Tbilisi who has the number. A researcher who can read the court filing in the original. Every one of them manually verified against their published work and covered by professional insurance, so commissioning is a decision rather than a risk assessment.
You find them, you talk to them directly, and when the story is worth going after properly, you book them through the platform.
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The BBC has sought to subpoena members of Donald Trump's family for documents and testimony in the his $10bn defamation lawsuit over a Panorama episode. (BBC)
The Irish Mirror is the 19th Reach website to add a premium subscription. (Irish Mirror)
Apple is discussing multi-year pay-per-use deals with publishers for their content to deliver news and information via an improved version of its AI voice assistant Siri. (Wall Street Journal)
Events have become the biggest revenue stream at Time, expected to make up more than half of its total this year compared to 28% in 2023. (A Media Operator)
The Wall Street Journal said cryptocurrency platform Binance's lawsuit against it failed to show actual malice as required by US libel law. WSJ's lawyer said the "action springs not from false facts, but from Binance’s unhappiness with the way the Journal reported truthful facts". (Courthouse News)
GB News presenter Patrick Christys says he and his pregnant wife, fellow GB News host Emily Carver, had to leave their home due to a police warning about a death threat after he went to Calais to report on human trafficking gangs. (Daily Mail)
New York Magazine has severed ties with columnist Ross Barkan after an independent editorial review found 67 of his columns "did not adhere" to editorial standards for proper attribution. (The Wrap)
Paul Doyle has joined Reach as its first editorial director of audio and video to lead its everyday video journalism and develop new formats. Ex-head of video Anna Jeys is now director of audience.
New research based on Ipsos iris data reveals proportion of young amongst audience of major online newsbrands.
San Francisco-based news site is first free Hearst newsbrand to add paid app.
Fake iterations of the Forbes website are packed with AI-generated and promotional content.
Working for publications which can be ‘disrespected’ has given him ‘something to prove’.
The Times of India and The Hill led month-on-month growth among the 50 biggest news websites in the US in July.
Hello! magazine was one of many publishers that saw website referrals from Google Discover plummet last year.
Chief content officer Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon talked Press Gazette UK editor Charlotte Tobitt through the “year of transformation” that has followed.
Hello! has fought back by making the most out of syndication channels while building its own community for the future.
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