Global media join forces to confront AI challenges

Around 30 European and North American media outlets on Wednesday joined a coalition launched by Britain's BBC, Sky News and The Guardian, aiming to secure fair payment for news content from artificial intelligence giants.

New members of the SPUR Coalition include France's CMA Media, Switzerland's Ringier and Canadian groups including The Globe and Mail and CBC/Radio Canada.

"The world's leading publishers are determined to open a new chapter in their relationship with technology platforms and public authorities," CMA deputy chief Jean-Christophe Tortora told a gathering of global news publishers' association WAN-IFRA in southern French city Marseille.

He called for "a 'new deal' based on fair value sharing, content protection and the defence of reliable and independent journalism".

SPUR was co-founded by the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian Media Group, Sky News, Telegraph Media and Belgium's Mediahuis, which operates in several European countries.

Tortora urged French President Emmanuel Macron to raise the publishers' concerns at this month's meeting of G7 leaders in Evian, eastern France.

The three-day WAN-IFRA meeting was dominated by the media sector's fears about whether its business model can survive the emergence of artificial intelligence.

"Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation" to provide training data for large language models, New York Times publisher Arthur Gregg Sulzberger told the congress on Monday.

SPUR -- short for Standards for Publisher Usage Rights -- argues that news content offered by media outlets comes at a high cost, and that tech and AI firms should pay a fair price for its use.

The coalition's initial aims include an ambitious push to develop infrastructure that would allow publishers to measure how their content is used by AI systems.

SPUR also plans talks on how news producers can license their content.

"Welcoming 30 new members... gives SPUR the scale required to turn its mission into a global mandate," Guardian Media chief and SPUR founding member Anna Bateson said.

"This collective strength will help legitimise the standards we create, safeguarding the intellectual property of publishers and providing AI developers with a route to scalable, sustainable licensing."