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Sulzberger Draws a Line on AI

Jun 27
1 min read

Updated: Oct 12


A journalist beside a printing press draws a green line between printed pages and a cloud of digital pixels.

At the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille on June 1, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger condemned AI companies for the “brazen theft of intellectual property,” and threw the paper's weight behind the expanding SPUR coalition — Standards for Publisher Usage Rights. Two days later, the congress unveiled its Innovation in Media report, whose core argument is blunt: in the AI age, newsrooms survive only by owning their direct relationship with the audience.

Read together, it's not a corporate squabble. It's the structural side of the trust story: whether original, verified reporting can survive being absorbed, uncredited, by models that never send a reader back. Rigor only matters if it isn't strip-mined for free.

Stories on press freedom, the Prize community, and the work of the Neal Conan Prize Winners and Neal Conan Laureates — once a month, on the last Saturday.

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