The media faces AI

The surge in artificial intelligence, accused of plundering journalistic content, is transforming the way we get our news. While this upheaval is putting an already weakened industry to the test, it could also reveal a few big winners.

“Even if things are feeling fine now, remember that these early swells herald an approaching tsunami.” At the 77th World News Media Congress of the World Association of Newspaper Publishers (WAN-IFRA), held in Marseille in June, the highly influential Chairman of the Board of The New York Times Company (and publisher of the eponymous newspaper), Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, sounded the alarm: artificial intelligence (AI) is sweeping through the media industry and risks wreaking havoc. “We are experiencing a paradigm shift,” confirms Walid Azar Atallah, portfolio manager at Mirova. “The rapid adoption of AI is having a direct impact not only on how news is produced, but also on how people consume information.”

Consider this: an internet user asks Gemini about the latest developments in the war in Ukraine. As of 19 August, at the time of writing, Google's AI replied: “In August 2026, the war in Ukraine is undergoing a phase of massive intensification of long-range strikes, alongside localised territorial adjustments.” It then went on to detail drone attacks on the logistics centres of the Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries, the heavy civilian casualty toll, and the shortage of Patriot interceptors for Ukraine's air defence. In short, a very comprehensive summary.

According to the Digital News Report 2026, produced by the Reuters Institute and published in June, 10% of those surveyed already use chatbots every week to keep up with the news. This figure is up by three percentage points year-on-year. The problem is that while most AI systems mention the sources from which their information is drawn, few people click on them. In July 2025, a study published by the Pew Research Centre showed that, one year after Google launched ‘AI Overviews’, only 1% of users visited the link cited in the AI-generated summary. Even traditional search results were viewed less frequently: 8% of visits featuring an AI summary resulted in a click, compared with 15% when no summary appeared. And the worst is yet to come: according to an article published by the Reuters Institute in January 2026, news publishers expect traffic from search engines to fall by 43% over the next three years.

“AI poses a risk of disintermediation for the media,” explains Walid Azar Atallah, portfolio manager at Mirova. “While traditional Google searches encourage users to click on links to news sites to find out more, the summaries provided by AI, on the other hand, are self-contained. They offer no incentive to dig deeper. For the media, this means fewer clicks, less traffic, fewer subscriptions and, consequently, less advertising revenue. This completely undermines their business model.”

This view is shared by Matthias Röser, global head of technology at BearingPoint, a management and technology consultancy: “We are witnessing a profound transformation in the way information is consumed. Language models such as ChatGPT or Google's AI summaries often respond directly to users' queries, without the need to click through to the original source.

For media companies, this means that traffic from external sources (‘referral traffic’) – long their main source of revenue and audience – is collapsing.”

This is a paradox when one considers that AI systems feed primarily on news articles. “We all learn from somewhere. To build their models, large language models (LLMs) used millions of articles, websites and publications, which may have included copyrighted sections from major journals,” points out Amaya Gutiérrez, head of investment and portfolio advisory at Rothschild & Co. “Firstly, this blurs the line between originality and plagiarism. Secondly, it raises a key question: can AI companies legally use copyrighted content to train their models without permission, or at the very least, payment?”

For Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the answer is clearly no. At the WAN-IFRA's World News Media Congress, the publisher of The New York Times, the prestigious American daily – with 13.35 million subscribers (mid-2026), around 30 bureaus worldwide and a long list of Pulitzer Prizes – delivered a scathing indictment of AI companies. “A brazen theft (…) that has occurred at an unprecedented scale (…) Tech giants strip-mine news sites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue.”

The situation is all the more delicate for the press as it comes at a time when the industry was already going through a difficult period. With the digitalisation of news, print sales have plummeted. For example, the daily circulation of the French press exceeded 15 million copies in 1946, compared with 9 million at the turn of the 2000s and fewer than 5 million in 2025 (including PDF downloads). Alongside this decline in print newspaper sales – which digital has never compensated for in terms of value – advertising revenue has plummeted. In Switzerland, across the press, television, radio and websites, advertising revenues fell from 3.75 billion Swiss francs in 2000 to 1.66 billion in 2024, representing a decline of more than 55% in less than 25 years.

“Twenty years after digitalisation, which upended the print media ecosystem, generative AI is now disrupting the traffic ecosystem,” points out Matthias Röser. “Language models are interposing themselves between the public and journalism, capturing attention, advertising and, in the absence of a licence, the content itself.”

The result? “We are careening toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists to do the expensive, difficult work of original reporting,” continued Arthur Gregg Sulzberger in his speech. In early February 2026, for example, The Washington Post – the legendary American daily newspaper that notably helped to expose the Watergate scandal – announced it was laying off around a third of its staff, including 300 journalists out of a total of 800. This drastic measure was intended to address the financial losses that have been mounting since 2023. More broadly, the number of local journalists per capita in the US has fallen by 81%, while nearly 3,500 newspapers have ceased publication over the last two decades.

“The economic pressure on newspapers has never been greater than it is today. Advertising revenue has been siphoned off by big tech, and subscriptions are in decline. The two economic pillars of the press are therefore under threat. And the advent of AI is exacerbating this trend,” summarises former journalist Bernard Maissen, president of the Swiss Press Council Foundation and former director of the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM). “Compared with other countries, the situation in Switzerland is not so bad. We do not yet have an ‘information desert’ (areas deprived of local, reliable and verified sources of information) as exists in certain regions. But we cannot yet see the light at the end of the tunnel in this transformation of the sector.”

Faced with this situation, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger has called on media organisations worldwide to resist: “Our profession has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of the abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution.” Since December 2023, The New York Times Company, which owns the newspaper of the same name, has been pursuing legal action in US courts against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copying and using millions of copyrighted articles without permission, notably to train their AI models.

But rather than confrontation, many media organisations prefer to negotiate with the big tech companies. In May 2024, for example, US group News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Sun and The Times, among others, signed an agreement with OpenAI. ChatGPT can thus use the group's content to answer its users' questions, for an estimated sum of over $250 million over five years, according to The Wall Street Journal. Prior to this, OpenAI had already signed similar contracts with numerous media organisations around the world, such as US news agency Associated Press (AP), German group Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt, Politico), Spanish group Prisa Media (El País, Diario AS, Cinco Días), French group Le Monde and UK newspaper Financial Times.

And OpenAI is not the only AI developer striking financial deals with media companies. “No one knows who will win the LLM race. Publishers are therefore opening up to several players,” notes Walid Azar Atallah. USA Today, CNN, Fox News, Prisa Media, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Newsmax and the Le Monde group, for instance, have signed deals with Meta. And The New York Times has partnered with Amazon. As for the French AI leader, Mistral AI, it entered into a partnership with AFP in January 2025, enabling Vibe, the company's chatbot, to use the full range of news reports from the French news agency.

“We are moving towards more licensing agreements between the media and big tech, because it is in everyone's interest to forge such partnerships,” emphasises Walid Azar Atallah. “On the one hand, media groups are looking for new sources of revenue and want to be paid for the use of their content. On the other, generative AI companies need vast amounts of data to train their models and feed their responses with reliable, up-to-date content.” This view is shared by Bernard Maissen, who was also editor-in-chief of the Swiss Telegraph Agency (SDA/ATS), now known as Keystone-SDA-ATS: “If there are no more journalists, AI companies will have nothing left to feed their machines with in terms of up-to-date, original and verified information.”

Are licensing agreements the panacea, the lifeline for journalism? No, say the experts we consulted. “The tech giants only talk to the major media organisations,” laments Bernard Maissen. “Smaller publishers have no say in the matter. It would be easier for The New York Times to sign an agreement with Google or Meta than it would be for the newspaper La Gruyère. Even TX Group, Switzerland's largest private media publisher, isn't a major player internationally.” According to journalist Titus Plattner, who works at Tamedia's (TX Group) AI Lab, no Swiss media organisation has yet signed a content licensing agreement with AI platforms. The risk? “Major media organisations that are doing well, such as The New York Times, will thrive, because they have the critical mass to negotiate with the tech giants and can invest in quality journalism and new technologies,” emphasises Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel, professor of journalism and digital communication at the Academy of Journalism and Media (University of Neuchâtel). “All the others – the smaller players that are nevertheless essential to pluralism – are under threat.”

This quest for critical mass has fuelled a wave of consolidation in the industry for several years. Among the most notable deals in the press, Japanese media group Nikkei acquired the British newspaper Financial Times in 2015 for €1.2 billion; The New York Times Company acquired the sports news website The Athletic in 2022 for $550 million; and German publisher Axel Springer bought British Telegraph Media Group, publisher of The Daily Telegraph, in June 2026 for £575 million. “Media consolidation will continue in the coming years, with more mergers and acquisitions,” predicts Jack Neele, portfolio manager at Robeco. This is unless such acquisitions are carried out by conglomerates or billionaires – such as Jeff Bezos, the former Amazon boss, who bought The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million.

In any case, while the sums involved in the licensing agreements between tech giants and major media groups may seem substantial on paper, they are not enough. In March 2026, for example, News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, signed a contract with Meta that could bring in up to $50 million a year. Although significant, the amount is little more than a drop in the ocean for the behemoth that is News Corp, which posted revenue of $9 billion for its 2026 financial year ending 30 June. For Axel Springer, the deal with OpenAI is expected to bring in between $25 million and $30 million over three years, while the FT could receive between $5 million and $10 million a year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

So how can the press turn things round? The example of The New York Times is illuminating. Over the years, the New York-based daily has successfully transitioned from a print newspaper in decline to a global digital giant whose revenues are soaring once again. In the second quarter of 2026, The New York Times Company's revenue surged by 11.2% to $762 million, driven by both an increase in subscriptions and a rise in advertising revenue.

“The success of The New York Times can be explained primarily by its subscription-driven bundle model. In 2025, the NYT gained around 1.4 million new digital subscribers, bringing its total to 12.8 million subscribers – a remarkable figure,” emphasises Matthias Röser. “At the heart of the strategy is the bundling of various offerings: news, games, cooking and other services are all included in a single subscription. This significantly boosts usage, strengthens customer loyalty, enables cross-selling between offerings and ultimately gives the NYT greater pricing power, as users pay for the entire package rather than for individual articles.” As a result, shares in The New York Times Company have risen by 30% over the past five years.

“The market is rewarding The New York Times for its successful transformation: from a newspaper in structural decline, it has become a rapidly growing subscription platform,” says Humberto Nardiello, equity fund manager at DPAM. “The most important decision was to continue investing in journalism while most players in the sector were cutting costs. This has helped preserve a high-quality product and strengthen the brand's association with independence and excellence.”

Like The New York Times, the current climate could favour certain players. “There won't only be losers. AI will also create winners among the media,” says Walid Azar Atallah. Jack Neele of Robeco shares this view: “The value of quality news will increase in the face of the avalanche of fake news and AI-generated content. I wouldn't be surprised if pure-play news organisations, specialising in quality journalism and investigative reporting, were to see their value rise over the coming years.”