The Washington Monthly has long been a think tank in magazine form. We publish deeply reported content that surfaces promising policy solutions to the country’s greatest problems, but as essays and feature stories, not white papers.
There are times, however, when our reporting and policy ideas are best conveyed on a bigger canvas. That’s why we’re pleased to announce the launch of our new in-house think tank, The Washington Monthly Institute, and the publication of our first research report: AI and the Future of Independent Journalism: The promise and peril of privately controlled data marketplaces for media content.
The report details new technologies that, with proper government regulation, could help small news outlets get paid for the content that artificial intelligence companies have been stealing from them.
Here’s a summary from the report:
Predatory business practices and failed public policy have made the spread of artificial intelligence a potentially existential threat to journalism. Artificial intelligence companies rely on journalists’ work to train their models while offering little or no compensation. At the same time, AI-generated news summaries divert readers from original reporting. Small, local, and independent publications are especially vulnerable, lacking the resources to pursue legal remedies or negotiate fair terms with AI companies.
Despite numerous public policy proposals, none have been implemented at the federal level, let alone provided meaningful relief to journalists and content creators. New technology could, however, offer an important step toward a solution if properly regulated. Cloudflare, which manages about 20 percent of global web traffic, now makes it harder for AI companies to scrape content from third-party websites without permission or payment. This could reduce the growing market power imbalance between journalists and Big Tech.
The report was written by Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, director of the Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets Institute, with which we have collaborated on this paper. Radsch’s work has previously appeared in the Washington Monthly magazine. Phillip Longman, a senior editor at the Washington Monthly magazine and policy director at the Open Markets Institute, edited the report. We are grateful to the Lumina Foundation for its support of this project.
Read the full report here.
