The Audiencers' team spent the first three days of June in Marseille for WAN-IFRA's 77th World News Media Congress (1–3 June 2026). Three days, one dominant question: what does AI mean for the value, and future of journalism? We sat through a dozen sessions to share a wrap-up of the event, and the conversations that mattered most.
📌 3 things to take from this recap
> Rethink your "traffic" metric: consider tracking the share of your content AI can't easily copy or summarize, alongside reach
> If you're negotiating an AI licensing deal, know whether you're getting a product partnership or just a defensive payout, they're not the same thing
> Audit how your newsroom's time actually splits across production, pre-, and post-publication before assuming AI tools are the fix
The AI reckoning: rights, traffic, and the first real deals
AG Sulzberger (NYT): the “original sin,” and an 8-point plan
The congress opened on its hardest line. AG Sulzberger (Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times) argued that generative AI is built on an “original sin” (the unprecedented theft of publishers’ intellectual property) and that this theft is now re-enacted “countless times every single day.” His most effective passage broke an AI model into four inputs: talent, compute, energy and data. The first three are paid for, handsomely; the fourth, books, films, music, journalism, is taken without consent or compensation. No tech CEO would ask their engineers to work for free or steal chips from an Nvidia plant; on data, “we just take” has become the norm.
“Tech giants strip-mine news websites… that otherwise would go to the news organisations that created this work.”
AG Sulzberger, Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times
He was careful to add he is not anti-AI (the NYT uses these tools internally) and that his target is the companies’ choices, not the technology.
The scale he put on the table: the NYT publishes ~500,000 original works a year for over $2bn, and remains the single largest source of proprietary data in a major dataset used to train many different models. Meanwhile the Google click is 10x harder than a decade ago, rival AI models send 96% less referral traffic than a Google search, and the largest news sites tracked by comScore have lost 45%+ of traffic in four years. His action plan came in eight points — four to defend your rights (stand up for them, deal carefully, push legislators, join together) and four to strengthen your title (use AI the right way, be a destination first, focus on original reporting, explain why journalism matters). He closed by restoring the half of the Stewart Brand quote everyone forgets:
