The Media Copilot

When AI answers the question, publishers lose more than the click. Bombora's Jaime Schultheis on why AI referrals convert, why Google is a shaky foundation, and what AI companies should give publishers besides a check.

Pete Pachal talks with Jaime Schultheis, head of global data partnerships at Bombora, about what Bombora's publisher data shows (steeper referral declines, more bots, niche B2B titles holding up), why AI referral traffic is small but converts far better than search, Google's new option to opt out of AI features, events and communities as "AI proof" experiences, measuring the halo effect for sponsors, sorting good bots from bad, TIME and Mobian's ads-for-bots model and Perplexity's pushback, and why she's optimistic that publishers will come out of this with more leverage.

Chapters
0:00 What a website visit is really worth
1:59 Jaime Schultheis, welcome to the Media Copilot
2:04 From newspapers to Bombora
3:39 "I probably was not worried enough"
4:53 What Bombora's publisher data is showing
6:17 Why specialty publishers are holding up
9:42 What's the reward for GEO?
12:10 Charging more for AI referral traffic
14:11 Don't build your business on Google
15:25 Google's new AI opt-out
16:59 Events, communities and "AI proof" experiences
20:37 The first step for a small publisher
23:13 Measuring the halo effect for sponsors
26:09 Getting into events without the pitfalls
28:58 Good bots, bad bots
32:35 What a fair AI deal should give back
37:05 TIME, Mobian and Perplexity's pushback
41:34 What worries her, and why she's optimistic
43:52 Outro

Guest
Jaime Schultheis, Head of Global Data Partnerships, Bombora
LinkedIn | Bombora

Mentioned
The Atlantic's AI Gamble with Nicholas Thompson
What TIME learned selling ads to bots, with Mark Howard

Watch on YouTube | Full post and transcript | Subscribe on Substack

Produced by The Media Copilot.
Music: "Favorite" by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Rob Kelly tracks 99 AI licensing deals. What publishers are really selling now, and why OpenAI may settle with the Times.

Kelly, the creator and host of Media & the Machine, keeps a spreadsheet of 99 AI content licensing deals, from The New York Times' little-discussed $100 million Google arrangement to Yelp's new deal with OpenAI. He ran the content licensing business at CMP Media, so he knows how profitable a licensing feed can be. Pete Pachal and Kelly cover the two early playbooks (the Times sues OpenAI, News Corp signs with it), why training is fading from the deals as inference and retrieval catch up, what Kelly calls licensing content to commerce, the squeeze on mid-tier publishers, and his prediction that OpenAI settles with the Times before its IPO.

In this episode

• Kelly's path from Wall Street and tech journalism to running content licensing at CMP Media
• The two early playbooks: the Times sues OpenAI, News Corp signs a $250 million deal
• The Times' little-discussed $100 million licensing deal with Google
• Why licensing revenue is close to pure profit for publishers
• How deals have shifted from training toward inference and RAG, and why the models haven't run out of training data
• Whether AI companies pay mainly to avoid lawsuits
• Licensing content to commerce: Yelp's request-a-quote button and a subscribe button inside the answer
• Google Zero and taking a beginner's mind to AI traffic
• How the AI answer is being renegotiated, from ads for bots to brand links
• The mid-tier squeeze, ProRata, and the RSL collective licensing protocol
• Whether Google or Apple could import the YouTube revenue-share model
• The backlash against AI among younger people, and an 8.7x productivity gain measured in a spreadsheet
• Two futures for media, and why Kelly expects OpenAI to settle with the Times before its IPO

Guest: Rob Kelly, Creator and Host, Media & the Machine: LinkedIn | Media & the Machine

Watch the video version: YouTube
Full post and transcript: mediacopilot.ai

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what's new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You'll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI.

Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Like and subscribe: youtube.com/@themediacopilot

Produced by The Media Copilot.
Music: "Favorite" by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

Bot traffic has already passed human traffic on the web. Oasy co-founder Choy Travers thinks publishers should stop blocking the bots and start selling them ads.

Pete Pachal talks with Choy Travers, co-founder of Amsterdam-based Oasy, about a new kind of advertising: sponsored content served to AI crawlers on a publisher's site, on the bet that the AI will use it when answering a user's question. They cover why blocking bots backfires, how Oasy's free-for-publishers, CPM-for-advertisers model works, disclosure that has to survive a crawl and a summary, Perplexity's cloaking objection, why licensing deals leave most publishers behind, and the billboard problem in AI attribution. This is part two of a two-part look at ads for bots; part one is Mark Howard, COO of TIME.

Disclosure: Pete has been running Oasy on mediacopilot.ai for several months.

In this episode

• Why blocking AI crawlers means removing yourself from the fastest-growing search channel
• How Oasy's model works: free for publishers, CPM for advertisers, one placement per page
• What an advertiser is actually buying when there's no guaranteed placement
• Disclosure that has to survive a crawl, a chunk, and a summary
• Perplexity's cloaking objection, and what it gets right and wrong
• Why licensing deals will pay the top players and leave the rest scraped
• Who is responsible when an AI platform strips the label
• Pay-per-crawl versus pay-per-use, and the billboard problem in attribution
• The utopian and dystopian versions of the ads-for-bots future

Guest: Choy Travers, Co-Founder, Oasy: LinkedIn | oasy.ai

Watch the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU43Zhz3esA
Full post and transcript: mediacopilot.ai

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what's new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You'll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI.

Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Like and subscribe: youtube.com/@themediacopilot

Produced by The Media Copilot.
Music: "Favorite" by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

Bot traffic passed human traffic on the web this year. TIME decided to sell the bots ads. One month in, COO Mark Howard explains what advertisers are buying, why the AI seems to remember what it scrapes, and what Perplexity got wrong.

Pete Pachal talks with Mark Howard, chief operating officer of TIME, about agent ads: brand-verified facts, labeled as sponsored, placed on the machine-readable versions of TIME pages for the AI crawlers it allows in. They cover the infrastructure TIME built first (TollBit, ScalePost, a 70-agent allow list), the Mobian brand-gap method behind each campaign, the two measurement studies, the referrals-versus-citations puzzle, what an advertiser actually buys, whether the models can read the disclosure, the Perplexity dispute, what counts as a legitimate crawler, and why pay-per-crawl is both Howard's biggest worry and biggest hope. This is part one of a two-part look at ads for bots; part two is Oasy co-founder Choy Travers.

In this episode

• Why TIME chose to learn by doing instead of waiting for the market to settle
• The infrastructure underneath agent ads: TollBit, ScalePost, and a 70-agent allow list
• The markdown page built for machines, and what an agent ad actually is
• Which bots show up, and what they're there for
• The TIME100 Creators moment that made the case for the product
• Mobian's method: visibility, favorability, and accuracy across the major models
• Why TIME believes the agents remember what they scrape
• One month of data: causal lift and model impact over time
• What the advertiser is buying when there's no guaranteed placement
• Whether the models can read the sponsored label, and what they do with it
• The Perplexity dispute, and what OpenAI thinks
• What counts as a legitimate crawler
• Pay-per-crawl as both the biggest worry and the biggest hope

Guest: Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer, TIME: LinkedIn | time.com

Watch the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjz-GEaibbI
Full post and transcript: mediacopilot.ai

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what's new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You'll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI.

Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Like and subscribe: youtube.com/@themediacopilot

Produced by The Media Copilot.
Music: "Favorite" by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

On this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal sits down with Onix co-founders David Bennahum and Nicholas Nadeau to explore a very different model for AI: one where experts own specialized AI systems built around their knowledge, voice, judgment and point of view.

They discuss why smaller, domain-specific models may sometimes outperform general-purpose AI, how Onix incorporates knowledge that has never appeared online, and why authorship, privacy and data sovereignty could become increasingly important as AI evolves.

The conversation also tackles the business side of expert-owned AI: 

Can creators turn their expertise into an AI product? Can journalists do it? 

What happens when an AI becomes an authorized extension of a person’s knowledge? And can experts actually participate economically in the value AI creates?

Plus, Pete challenges the Onix founders on hallucinations, model accuracy, scalability and what happens when expert-owned AI moves beyond health and wellness.

Key topics include:
 AI and intellectual property
 Expert-owned AI
 Small language models vs. frontier models
 Data privacy and sovereignty
 AI hallucinations
 Creator monetization
 The future of journalism and knowledge work
 The emerging “author economy”

Try Onix: Onix.life    |  Media Copilot early-access code: COPILOT

🔗 About the 👤 Guests

David S. Bennahum | Co-Founder & CEO, Onix. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbennahum 

Nicholas Nadeau, Ph.D., P.Eng. |  Co-Founder & CTO, Onix.| https://ca.linkedin.com/in/engnadeau 

_____

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.

Enjoyed this episode?

Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the YouTube channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit mediacopilot.ai.

Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

As AI reshapes the internet, the future of journalism may depend on how publishers license, distribute, and protect their content.

On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Michael Ellis, President of Newstex, to explore one of the most important and least understood battlegrounds in artificial intelligence: content licensing.

As AI companies race to build smarter models and answer engines, publishers are grappling with a fundamental question: How should their work be used, and how should they be compensated?

For more than two decades, Newstex has helped publishers distribute licensed content to research platforms, financial information services, and now AI-powered products. Ellis explains why licensing is no longer simply about granting access to content. Instead, it's about defining purpose, preserving context, and ensuring publishers retain both value and visibility in an AI-driven ecosystem.

The conversation explores why high-quality, licensed content is becoming increasingly valuable as AI systems struggle with misinformation and low-quality "AI slop." Ellis discusses the growing importance of attribution, provenance, machine-readable metadata, and usage-based compensation models that reward publishers based on how their content is actually used.

Pete and Michael also examine how smaller and independent publishers can compete in a marketplace increasingly dominated by large technology companies, why collective licensing models may offer a path forward, and how platforms like ProRata and AskNews are building new approaches to attribution and publisher compensation.

Finally, Ellis shares both his optimism and his concerns for the future of journalism in the AI era, explaining why the industry must move quickly to build sustainable business models before the economics of publishing are permanently reshaped.

Why This Matters

The battle over AI and journalism isn't just about copyright. It's about who gets rewarded for creating trusted information. As AI becomes the primary interface for discovering knowledge, publishers face a defining moment. This conversation explores how licensing, attribution, and new business models could determine whether quality journalism thrives or struggles in the age of generative AI.

Key Topics

• Why AI content licensing is about purpose, not simply permission
• How Newstex connects publishers with AI platforms and research services
• Why provenance and context matter as much as content itself
• The economics of usage-based compensation for publishers
• How smaller publishers can compete in an AI-first information economy
• The role of metadata, attribution, and machine-readable content
• AI-generated content versus trusted editorial content
• The future of paywalls and premium journalism
• How companies like ProRata and AskNews are changing content licensing
• What publishers must do now to prepare for an AI-mediated future

🔗 About the 👤 Guest

Michael Ellis  -  President, Newstex

• 🌐 Author Page: https://www.newstex.com/author/michael-ellis 
• 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/msellis/ 

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.

Enjoyed this episode?
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the YouTube channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit mediacopilot.ai.

Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team 
Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

What if the future of AI in media isn't replacing storytellers, but giving them better tools to tell better stories?

This episode is sponsored by Descript.com 

In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping media production without sacrificing creativity, editorial judgment, or human storytelling.

Laura explains why Descript's vision has never been about replacing editors, but about eliminating the repetitive, time consuming tasks that slow production. From text based video editing and AI assisted collaboration to intelligent clipping and personalized workflows, she shares how AI is becoming a creative partner rather than an automated replacement.

The conversation also examines why memory, personalization, and collaboration may become AI's greatest strengths, how media organizations are adapting to an increasingly creator driven landscape, and why the next generation of production tools will focus less on software features and more on helping teams create great content.

Finally, Laura offers a refreshing perspective on the future of AI, arguing that the industry has spent too much time selling fear instead of showing creators how these tools can unlock more original storytelling, more creative freedom, and entirely new ways of producing media.

The conversation explores:

• Why AI should replace repetitive labor, not human creativity
• How Descript evolved from a text based editor into an AI powered production platform
• Why collaboration remains the most valuable feature in modern media workflows
• How AI memory is creating more personalized creative assistants
• Why editorial judgment, taste, and storytelling still belong to humans
• How newsrooms and media companies are producing more content with smaller teams
• Why the future of media production is conversational, collaborative, and AI assisted
• How creators can use AI to spend less time on tools and more time telling better stories

Why this matters

Artificial intelligence is transforming every stage of media production, but the biggest opportunity isn't replacing creative professionals. It's removing the friction that keeps them from creating. As newsrooms, marketing teams, and independent creators face growing pressure to produce more content across more platforms, AI has the potential to become an intelligent collaborator that accelerates production while preserving human judgment, creativity, and authenticity. This conversation offers valuable insight for journalists, marketers, content creators, media executives, and anyone navigating the future of AI powered storytelling.

🔗 About the 👤 Guest

Laura Burkhauser is the CEO of Descript, the AI powered audio and video editing platform used by creators, media organizations, podcasters, and enterprise teams around the world. Under her leadership, Descript continues to pioneer AI assisted media production, helping storytellers simplify complex workflows while keeping human creativity at the center of the creative process.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/burkhauser/
Descript: https://www.descript.com

This episode is brought to you by Descript.

Descript makes editing podcasts and video as easy as editing a document. Record, transcribe, clean up audio, remove filler words, create clips, and more with powerful AI tools built right into your workflow.

Spend less time editing and more time creating with Descript.

Visit Descript to learn more.

—

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.

Enjoyed this episode?

Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the YouTube channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit mediacopilot.ai.

Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

Bots now make up about half of all web traffic. Are they a threat to block or an audience to win? 

For most of the web's history, the deal was simple. Search engines pointed people to websites, and those visits paid for the content through advertising and subscriptions. AI is rewriting that arrangement, and the clearest place to see it is in who, or what, is showing up at the door.

Akamai says it now handles more than 150 billion bot requests a day, with AI bot traffic climbing more than 300% year over year. Bots account for roughly half of all internet traffic. On this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, Pete Pachal talks with two Akamai executives who sit on opposite sides of that shift: Kim Salem-Jackson, the company's chief marketing officer, and Patrick Sullivan, its CTO of security strategy. Their jobs once had little to do with each other. Now they are working the same problem from two directions.

For Sullivan, bots have been a security headache for more than a decade. What changed is that the most valuable visitor to a site is now also a bot: the retrieval and training crawlers that feed large language models. "The VIP visitor to the website are the various bots that really make LLMs go," he says. Detection and blocking are no longer the point. Akamai keeps dozens of categories of bots and a menu of responses for each.

For Salem-Jackson, the reframe is sharper. She treats LLMs as a new audience, each with its own personality, the way a marketer treats different buyers. "The bots are my new customer," she says. She monitors bot volume by the hour, rolls out a welcome mat, and watches whether her team's work on AI visibility pulls more crawlers in.

The catch is that the same bot looks like an opportunity to one business and a threat to another. A training crawler can compress a publisher's entire site, hand it to a model, and never send a reader back. Sullivan puts the ratio of training visits to human visits at tens of thousands to one. For a company like Akamai that wants to show up in AI answers, that crawler gets cookies and milk. For a publisher whose business runs on traffic, the same crawler is something to block or charge for.

That’s where the conversation gets useful for media people. Akamai offers pay-per-click tools, but Sullivan is candid that those models are early and that content licensing deals remain more common. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is the business and legal call about what to allow, and who can enforce it. Unlike Cloudflare, which has taken a loud public stance on publisher control, Akamai casts itself as "Switzerland," a technology enabler that leaves the decision to the publisher.

Then there’s the part every publisher can act on now. Salem-Jackson says an average webpage runs about 200,000 tokens, but a model reads only around 10,000. Roughly 1% of your site actually gets consumed. Anything important that sits below that budget is invisible. Her fix was a separate "bot site" that serves crawlers stripped-down, high-value content, which she credits for an 85% lift in citations. Great content is not enough if the machine cannot read it.

Key Takeaways

• AI bot traffic is up more than 300% a year, and bots now make up about half of all web traffic

• For some sites, the most valuable visitor may now a bot, not a person

• The difference between training bots, retrieval bots, and malicious bots

• Marketers are starting to treat LLMs as an audience to court, each with its own personality

• The same crawler can be an asset or a threat depending on whether your business runs on visibility or on traffic

• Pay-per-click for bots exists, but licensing deals are still the more common path, and enforcement rests with publishers rather than the CDN

• A model reads only about 1% of a webpage, so anything below the token budget is invisible to AI

• A separate bot-optimized site can raise AI citations sharply, which Akamai puts at 85%

• Wikipedia, LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit carry outsized weight in what LLMs cite

🔗 About the 👤 Guests

Kim Salem Jackson
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimsalemjackson/

Patrick Sullivan
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricksully 

Akamai Technologies
 https://www.akamai.com

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.

Enjoyed this episode?
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the YouTube channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit mediacopilot.ai.

Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

Local journalism has spent the last two decades fighting for survival. First came the internet. Then Craigslist. Then Google and social media. Advertising disappeared, newsrooms shrank, and communities across the country became news deserts.

Now comes AI.

For many journalists and publishers, artificial intelligence feels like the next existential threat...a technology capable of flooding the internet with cheap content, eroding trust, disrupting search, and making it even harder for real journalism to survive.
But what if AI could also be part of the solution?

On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Paul Gewuerz, host of Small Press, Big Ideas and founder of LocalPod, to explore what is actually happening on the front lines of local media.

After more than 120 conversations with publishers, editors, entrepreneurs, and local news operators, Paul has seen firsthand how deeply challenged the industry remains. But he has also discovered something that rarely makes the headlines: new ideas are taking root.

From local newspapers transforming themselves into cafés and community gathering spaces to publishers building new revenue streams, launching podcasts, embracing events, and using AI to accomplish work that once required entire teams, local journalism is being reinvented in unexpected ways.

Pete and Paul discuss why trust may become even more valuable in an internet overwhelmed by AI-generated content, how small newsrooms are already using tools like ChatGPT and Otter.ai, and why AI could give independent publishers the ability to launch products and businesses that simply weren't possible before.

They also confront the darker side of this transformation, including AI slop, fake local news sites, politically funded "pink slime" operations, and the growing challenge of knowing what information...and which sources...can actually be trusted.

In this episode:

• Why local journalism remains vital to healthy communities and democracy
• How innovative publishers are reinventing the local news business model
• Why trust could become journalism's greatest advantage in the age of AI
• How small newsrooms are actually using AI today
• The opportunities AI creates for new products, revenue streams, and branded content
• Why AI-generated local news and "pink slime" sites pose a growing threat
• How podcasts can help local publishers grow audiences and deepen community relationships
• Why Paul believes AI represents a new industrial revolution
• The uncomfortable reality of building with AI: if you can create something faster, so can everyone else

Why This Matters
For Paul, the promise of AI is personal. After spending more than two years building a software platform with limited progress, he used AI-assisted coding tools to complete it in just two months.

“I’ve been working on a software platform for my company for two and a half years, had about 10% done. I have finished it in the last two months. It is operational. People are on the platform.”

His experience raises one of the biggest questions facing media today: What happens when suddenly anyone can build almost anything?

About the 👤 Guest
Paul Gewuerz on LinkedIn: Paul Gewuerz LinkedIn profile
LocalPod website: LocalPod.co
Small Press, Big Ideas on LinkedIn: Small Press, Big Ideas LinkedIn page

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.

Enjoyed this episode?
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the YouTube channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit mediacopilot.ai.
Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team
Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

As AI transforms the way news is created and consumed, The Wall Street Journal is reimagining storytelling around trust, personalization, and audience experience.

This episode is sponsored by: Adobe Acrobat

This week on The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal sits down with Taneth Evans, Head of Digital at The Wall Street Journal, to explore how one of the world's leading news organizations is navigating the AI revolution.

Rather than chasing every new AI trend, Evans shares how the Journal evaluates emerging technology through a simple lens: Does it genuinely help journalists do better work or help readers better understand the world?

From AI-powered investigative tools and newsroom workflows to personalized storytelling and adaptive content, Evans offers a thoughtful look at how AI can strengthen journalism without compromising trust.

"So many times in the past few years, I've said to people, what would you do with a building full of journalists at your disposal? No newsroom feels like it has enough resources... How can we use AI to help us get closer to the answers to that question?" — Taneth Evans

The conversation explores why journalism is evolving beyond a single article format into flexible experiences tailored to how each reader prefers to consume information, while keeping facts, reporting, and editorial standards at the center.

Sponsor:

The new Adobe productivity agent orchestrates tools and models to generate images, text and rich content like presentations, podcasts and social posts, while also powering conversational PDF editing in Acrobat.

With new PDF Spaces capabilities, users can combine files, links and notes into interactive, shareable spaces for research, collaboration and content creation. VICE News, Kid Cudi and celebrity event planner Mindy Weiss are already using these tools to build trust and deeper engagement with their audiences.

Link: Do that with Acrobat: AI-Powered PDF workspaces | Adobe Acrobat

What we cover

• How The Wall Street Journal evaluates new AI technologies

• Why audience needs come before AI innovation

• The rise of personalized and adaptive journalism

• AI tools transforming investigations and newsroom workflows

• How AI can create entirely new reader experiences

• Why trust, attribution, and media literacy matter more than ever

• The future of publisher owned experiences in an AI driven world

• Why great reporting becomes even more valuable in the age of AI

As AI changes how information is distributed, the challenge isn't simply adopting new technology. It's preserving trust while creating better ways for people to engage with journalism. Evans argues that the future belongs to news organizations that use AI to deepen their relationship with readers, not replace it.

Why This Matters

News consumption is changing rapidly. Readers increasingly expect personalized, accessible experiences while publishers face growing competition from AI powered search, chatbots, and automated summaries. The organizations that succeed will be those that combine trusted reporting with innovative experiences that make journalism more useful, more engaging, and more relevant. This conversation offers an inside look at how one of the world's leading newsrooms is preparing for that future.

About the 👤 Guest

Taneth Evans Head of Digital, The Wall Street Journal

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taneth-evans-b35877162 

The Wall Street Journal:https://www.wsj.com

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.

Enjoyed this episode?

Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the YouTube channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit mediacopilot.ai.

Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026