Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead. In today’s audio-led edition: Which door will the SCA management choose? And, to very few people’s surprise, the AI companies do not appear to be playing fair when crawling publishing content.

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Will it be The Cat’s week?

If The Australian is correct, this may be the week where the board of Southern Cross Austereo makes up its mind about whether it wants to get into bed with Antony Catalano’s Australian Community Media.

As we discuss in the podcast, the choice boils down to two alternative paths - the pureplay audio future visualised by SCA’s management where the company’s Listnr investment begins to pay for itself; or an attempt to become a multi-platform regional powerhouse.

Also today, there’s growing evidence that AI companies are scraping news sites without permission. Meanwhile, local publishers with traffic built around SEO are becoming increasingly alarmed by Google’s AI Overviews product which threatens to cost them clicks by giving a full answer on the page.

Further reading:

* The Australian: Southern Cross ‘heavily engaged’ on ACM merger bid

* Australian Financial Review: Publishers fear this new Google AI feature will kill their traffic

* Reuters: Exclusive: Multiple AI companies bypassing web standard to scrape publisher sites, licensing firm says

* Unmade: Is it blackmail?

* Unmade: Domain becomes biggest part of Nine’s worth

Today’s episode features Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy

Editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Time to leave you to start your week. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

[email protected]

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