Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast The Media Copilot
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What 99 AI Licensing Deals Reveal About the Future of Publishing, With Rob Kelly | 24 sept. 2026 | 00:43:03 | |
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
Guest: Rob Kelly, Creator and Host, Media & the Machine: LinkedIn | Media & the Machine Watch the video version: YouTube 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. | |||
| Can Publishers Sell Ads to Bots? Oasy's Choy Travers Is Betting On It | 17 sept. 2026 | 00:37:17 | |
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
Guest: Choy Travers, Co-Founder, Oasy: LinkedIn | oasy.ai Watch the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU43Zhz3esA 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. | |||
| What TIME Learned From a Month of Selling Ads to Bots, With COO Mark Howard | 10 sept. 2026 | 00:52:05 | |
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
Watch the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjz-GEaibbI 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. | |||
| Who Owns Your Expertise in the Age of AI? Onix Wants to Give It Back to You | 27 août 2026 | 00:37:23 | |
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?
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 _____
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 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| The future of AI content licensing, featuring Michael Ellis | 13 août 2026 | 00:45:55 | |
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?
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.
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.
Michael Ellis - President, Newstex
Enjoyed this episode? Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso | |||
| AI won't replace Creators. It will replace the work they hate. | 08 août 2026 | 00:40:19 | |
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.
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.
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 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. —
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 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| When bots become the audience | 23 juil. 2026 | 00:45:19 | |
Bots now make up about half of all web traffic. Are they a threat to block or an audience to win?
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
• 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
Kim Salem Jackson
Enjoyed this episode?
Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| AI didn’t kill Local News. Could it actually save it? | 09 juil. 2026 | 00:41:04 | |
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.
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 This Matters “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 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.
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| The future of journalism is personal: How The Journal is building AI for readers, not robots | 25 juin 2026 | 00:42:57 | |
As AI transforms the way news is created and consumed, The Wall Street Journal is reimagining storytelling around trust, personalization, and audience experience.
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 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
• 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.
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.
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
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 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| AI's reality check: Why Sharon Goldman is looking beyond the hype | 18 juin 2026 | 00:46:10 | |
What we cover • Why AI companies are struggling to win public trust
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
AI is no longer just a technology story. It is influencing how businesses operate, how information is distributed, how governments make decisions, and how communities adapt to rapid change. Understanding AI's real-world impact is becoming just as important as understanding the technology itself. As adoption accelerates and public skepticism grows, the conversation is shifting from what AI can do to how it affects people, jobs, infrastructure, and society as a whole.
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 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| Tech companies are becoming Media companies. What happens next? | 12 juin 2026 | 00:37:39 | |
As AI transforms how people discover information, the relationship between technology, media, and audience trust is evolving rapidly.
In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal speaks with Jonathan Hunt, VP of Media & Content at HubSpot and Head of The Hustle, about the growing convergence of technology, media, and audience ownership. As AI transforms how people discover information, search for answers, and build trust online, companies are rethinking their relationship with media. HubSpot has quietly assembled one of the most ambitious media portfolios in business, spanning newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, creator partnerships, and acquisitions including The Hustle, Mindstream, Starter Story, and Futurepedia. Their conversation explores why audience ownership has become increasingly valuable in an AI-driven world, how brands are adapting to changing discovery patterns, and why trusted human voices may be more important than ever as generative AI floods the internet with content. 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
The discussion highlights a broader shift taking place across media and marketing: the growing realization that audience ownership may be just as important as product ownership.
• Why AI may increase the value of human-created content rather than diminish it • How HubSpot built a media network through acquisitions, launches, and creator partnerships • The strategic thinking behind acquiring brands like The Hustle, Mindstream, and Starter Story • Why audience ownership matters more than ever in a fragmented media environment • How AI-powered discovery is changing traffic, engagement, and customer acquisition • What Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) means for publishers and marketers • Why visitors arriving from ChatGPT and other AI tools often convert at higher rates • The growing influence of YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and creator-driven media on AI search results • OpenAI's acquisition of TBPN and what it could signal about the future of technology-owned media • How HubSpot balances editorial independence with corporate ownership • The role of AI in content creation, production workflows, and operational efficiency • Whether concerns about a "SaaS apocalypse" are reality or industry hype • Why authentic creator partnerships outperform traditional influencer marketing
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwhunt HubSpot Author Profile: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/author/jonathan-hunt
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| Local news, AI, and the fight for accountability | 04 juin 2026 | 00:37:35 | |
How veteran editor Rick Hirsch sees AI helping journalists do more with less, while protecting the trust that investigative reporting depends on. What happens when artificial intelligence meets one of journalism's most important missions: holding power accountable? In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal speaks with Rick Hirsch, director of the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability at the University of Florida and former Managing Editor of the Miami Herald. After more than four decades in journalism, Hirsch has witnessed nearly every major transformation in the media industry, from the rise of the internet and social media to today's AI revolution. Their conversation explores how AI is changing investigative and accountability journalism, not as a replacement for reporters, but as a powerful tool for uncovering stories, analyzing massive datasets, and helping newsrooms stretch increasingly limited resources.
While much of the AI conversation in media focuses on content generation, traffic disruption, and business models, accountability journalism presents a different challenge. Investigative reporting relies on verification, judgment, sourcing, and public trust. AI can accelerate research and surface patterns that humans might miss, but it cannot replace the reporting instincts, ethical decision-making, and community engagement that make journalism valuable. As local newsrooms continue to shrink and public trust remains under pressure, the future of accountability reporting may depend on how effectively journalists learn to use AI without sacrificing the standards that define their work.
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
For accountability journalism, AI's greatest value lies in helping reporters process information faster, identify patterns, and uncover potential leads. Human verification and editorial judgment remain essential. Local journalism may benefit the most As newsroom resources continue to decline, AI tools can help journalists monitor government meetings, legislative activity, and public records that would otherwise go uncovered. Trust remains journalism's biggest challenge The business model remains uncertain Accountability reporting still matters
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-hirsch-miami/
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 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 | |||
| The Scraper Economy is already here. Publishers just aren’t getting paid. | 28 mai 2026 | 00:43:25 | |
As AI systems increasingly rely on publisher content to answer questions, a new marketplace for information has quietly emerged. The problem? Publishers are barely part of it. This episode is sponsored by: Adobe Acrobat
The conversation explores the fast-growing “scraper economy,” where data brokers, indexing companies, and AI infrastructure providers are quietly monetizing access to the web at massive scale while traditional publishers struggle to establish sustainable licensing models. With this gray market of internet data growing, how can publishers both protect their content and take advantage of the now billion-dollar demand for it? Pete and Jonathan also explore:
As generative AI continues reshaping how audiences consume information, the future of publishing may depend on whether media companies can establish sustainable economic models around their content before gray-market scraping ecosystems become the default infrastructure layer of the internet. This conversation goes beyond AI hype and digs into the economics, legal gray areas, and technical realities quietly redefining the relationship between publishers, platforms, and information itself.
Website: https://cashmere.io/ Company Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cashmereio Manifesto: https://cashmere.io/manifesto
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
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
All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| AI won’t save Local News. But it might reinvent it. | 14 mai 2026 | 00:46:32 | |
Local journalism is collapsing under old business models. The next version may be more dependent on AI than most newsrooms are ready to admit. By The Copilot
On this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, Pete Pachal speaks to Allison Murphy, COO of Axios, to explore how Axios Local is experimenting with AI-driven newsroom operations, “hyperlocal” expansion, and lean reporting teams designed to scale across hundreds of communities. The needle to thread: how to produce high-quality local journalism without sacrificing editorial standards. From AI-assisted social publishing and newsroom training to experimental tools like the “Axiomizer” and “Localizer,” the conversation goes beyond vague AI hype and into the real mechanics of how modern media organizations are adapting in real time. Murphy also explores newsroom trust, AI transparency, audience skepticism, regional expansion strategy, and the growing financial pressure forcing publishers to rethink how journalism can remain sustainable in the modern media economy. “The fundamental challenge with local journalism now is a financial one. We are looking at how we can bring the cost of delivering really high quality, originally reported journalism and news and information to many, many communities.”
• Why Axios sees AI as essential to saving local journalism economics
Most conversations about AI in the media stay theoretical. This one gets operational. Axios is actively testing what an AI-enabled newsroom looks like at scale—not in a lab, but across real communities with real reporters and real business pressures. As local journalism continues to shrink nationwide, the stakes are bigger than newsroom efficiency. They’re about whether sustainable local reporting can exist at all in the next decade. For anyone working in journalism, media strategy, publishing, audience growth, or AI product development, this episode offers one of the clearest looks yet at how a modern newsroom is trying to adapt before the industry’s financial realities force even harder choices.
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonmmurphy • Axios official site: https://www.axios.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.
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 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| How AI is changing B2B media | 24 avr. 2026 | 00:33:37 | |
In a world of fewer clicks and higher stakes, B2B media is being rebuilt around outcomes, not impressions.
A single decision can involve millions of dollars and require input from 5 to 15 stakeholders. That changes everything about how content is created, distributed, and measured. At the same time, AI is reshaping how audiences discover information. Fewer clicks. More summaries. More intermediaries. Which means fewer chances to capture attention, but higher stakes when you do. That’s the shift happening in media that’s beneath the surface of headlines about lawsuits and AI slop. In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal talks with Keith Turco, CEO of Madison Logic, to unpack the shift to better understand how AI is changing not just media, but B2B publishers. The result is a fundamental shift: Quality over quantity. Precision over reach. Outcomes over impressions. For publishers, marketers, and media operators, this is not just a trend. It is a structural change in how value is created. What we cover
https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithturco/ Learn more about Madison Logic: 🌐 https://www.madisonlogic.com/ 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/madison-logic/ 🐦 https://twitter.com/MadisonLogic
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 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| The Real Battle in AI Isn’t Capability. It’s Trust. | 08 avr. 2026 | 00:36:41 | |
Why the future of generative media may hinge on who owns the data and who gets paid for it.
The generative AI boom has largely focused on what these models can do. Less attention has been paid to how they are built and who benefits.
This conversation reframes the debate: The future of AI may depend less on better models and more on building systems that businesses can actually trust. What We Cover • Why “brand-safe” AI is becoming a business requirement, not a feature
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/yair-adato-4936b236 Americans for Ben-Gurion University feature https://americansforbgu.org/generative-ai/ Bria (official site) https://bria.ai Bria AI LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/briaai Bria AI Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bria.ai Bria AI Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BriaAI
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.
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| Can You Certify Good AI use? This Organization Thinks So | 26 mars 2026 | 00:46:23 | |
As AI reshapes journalism and media, Richard Murphy of the Alliance for Audited Media explains why the industry needs actual standards.
From drafting articles to generating images to influencing distribution, artificial intelligence is now embedded across the entire content pipeline in many organizations. But as adoption accelerates, trust is breaking down just as fast.
Murphy explains how publishers, advertisers, and audiences are all asking the same question in different ways: How do we know what is real, who created it, and whether we can trust it? The answer, at least in part, may lie in standards.
Media has always relied on trust as its currency. AI is testing that foundation. When audiences cannot tell whether content is human-created, AI-assisted, or fully synthetic, credibility becomes fragile. At the same time, advertisers and partners are demanding proof that what they are funding or distributing meets ethical standards. This is where certification enters the picture. Ethical AI frameworks are quickly becoming more than best practice. They are positioning themselves as a competitive advantage, a compliance strategy, and potentially a defense against future regulation. The bigger shift is this: AI is not just changing how content is created. It is redefining what accountability looks like in media.
LinkedIn (Personal Profile): https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphy01 AAM Leadership Bio: https://auditedmedia.com/about/leadership Alliance for Audited Media): https://auditedmedia.com Digital Content Next (Articles): https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/author/richmurphy/
Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso | |||
| When AI changes discovery, who still gets paid? | 19 mars 2026 | 00:49:56 | |
What we cover
The old web rewarded volume. The next era may reward credibility. In Jeavons’ view, AI is speeding up a market correction that was already underway. Publishers built around commodity content and low value ad impressions face increasing risk. But organizations that create trusted reporting, specialized expertise, or high intent commerce content may still have a path forward. The future, he suggests, will not be defined by whether AI destroys publishing. It will be defined by which publishers learn how to operate in a world where attention is filtered through intelligent systems, trust carries a premium, and audiences are willing to pay for what feels indispensable. About the 👤 Guest
🔗 Nomix Group Website: https://nomix.group LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nomix-group/ About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the freshly updated 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?
For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| Search is Changing Fast. Is Your Brand Ready for the Answer Engine Era? | 12 mars 2026 | 00:46:39 | |
Search is no longer just about blue links and ranking on Google. More and more, people are getting their answers directly from AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and other answer engines that summarize information, pull citations, and decide what gets surfaced in real time. That means visibility is changing, and so is the value of content. In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal speaks with Josh Blyskal, who leads answer engine optimization research at Profound, a company focused on tracking how brands appear inside AI generated answers. Their conversation explores what answer engine optimization really means, how it differs from traditional SEO, and why specificity, utility, and structure now matter more than ever.
• Website: https://www.joshblyskal.com • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-blyskal • X: https://twitter.com/joshblyskal • Speaker Deck: https://speakerdeck.com/joshbly
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 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| Building the Newsroom AI Playbook Without Turning Journalism into Slop | 05 mars 2026 | 00:50:42 | |
Chua shares how Semafor is experimenting with practical AI tools that support journalists in everyday workflows. These include tools for copy editing and proofreading, systems that suggest relevant datasets for charts while a reporter is writing, and tools that help surface related reporting across different outlets and languages.
This episode looks at how reporters, editors, and media organizations are adapting as AI becomes part of the information ecosystem.
TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 – Intro: Journalism in the AI Era 02:15 – Gina’s Background & Semafor’s Model 06:00 – How Newsrooms Are Using AI Today 10:00 – Trust in a Synthetic World 14:00 – Transparency & Disclosure 18:30 – AI Tools Inside Reporting 23:00 – The Risk of Information Overload 27:30 – Reinventing the News Business 32:00 – Where AI Helps Most 36:30 – The Future of Journalism
LinkedIn 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ginachua X (Twitter) 👉 https://x.com/GinaSKChua Instagram 👉 https://www.instagram.com/gina_chua_nyc Personal Website / Writing 👉 https://ginachua.me Author Page (Semafor) 👉 https://www.semafor.com/author/gina-chua —- About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the freshly updated 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. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| She’s Building the AI Agent That Could Replace Your News Feed | 26 févr. 2026 | 00:43:21 | |
In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal talks with Eva Cicinyte, co-founder and CEO of Gnomi, an AI-powered real-time news agent designed to synthesize global information into actionable insight. The goal isn’t summaries or more feeds. It’s context. Eva explains how her experience in political data analytics shaped her mission to make high quality understanding accessible to everyone, not just institutions with research teams. Gnomi pulls from global sources, social platforms, video, audio, and financial data to deliver personalized intelligence in real time. The platform’s new Finance Mode can even analyze live earnings calls as they happen, potentially surfacing market signals before headlines move prices. • Why Gnomi is built as an “intelligence layer,” not a news app
00:00 – Intro: Why AI Agents Matter Now Big-picture framing of the agent shift. 02:10 – Eva’s Background & Building Gnomi How she entered the agent space and what problem they’re solving. 05:40 – What Actually Is an AI Agent? Clear distinction between chatbots and agents. 09:15 – From Answers to Action How agents move from generating text to executing workflows. 13:50 – Designing Guardrails & Trust Why autonomy requires control and reliability. 18:20 – Real-World Use Cases Where agents are already creating leverage. 22:45 – AI in the Workflow Stack Replacing apps and orchestrating tools. 27:30 – Human + AI Collaboration Why agents amplify people instead of replacing them. 32:10 – Infrastructure: Memory, Context & Systems What makes agents actually autonomous. 37:00 – Competitive Advantage in the Agent Era How companies should think about adoption. 41:30 – The Future of the Agent Economy Where this is all headed next.
👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-cicinyte-1447161b2 Instagram (Personal) 👉 https://www.instagram.com/evapariscicinyte Official Website LinkedIn (Company Page) 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/company/gnomi
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 | |||
| Fake News at Machine Speed: Inside AI’s Impact on Media Trust | 19 févr. 2026 | 00:51:21 | |
Poynter’s Alex Mahadevan explains how newsrooms can use AI without losing the fundamentals of verification, context, and accountability. By The Copilot AI is already embedded in how people discover and consume news, from search to chat interfaces to automated summaries. So the question is no longer whether journalism will be shaped by AI. It’s how newsrooms maintain trust while experimenting responsibly. In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, Pete Pachal sits down with Alex Mahadevan, Director of MediaWise and a faculty member at Poynter, to unpack what media literacy looks like now that anyone can generate convincing content at scale. Alex shares how his background in data and local journalism shaped his approach to tools, why public-facing AI ethics policies matter, and what it will take for news organizations to bring audiences along for the next phase of the information ecosystem.
Trust is the core product. AI can either widen the trust gap with errors and low-quality content, or help rebuild credibility through transparency, better products, and clearer communication about how journalism is made. This conversation gets practical about what responsible AI use looks like, where disclosures help and where they can unintentionally slow innovation, and why the newsroom AI divide is becoming a real competitive advantage for organizations that adapt. What we cover • Alex’s journey into journalism and the global mission of MediaWise • How AI is reshaping misinformation, trust, and newsroom transparency • Practical uses of chatbots, coding agents, and AI workflows • The widening divide between AI enthusiasts and skeptics in newsrooms • Ethics, job concerns, and gray areas around AI-assisted writing • What the future of news may look like beyond traditional articles About the 👤 Guest
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.
Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| AI, and copyright: How media can decide between litigation or negotiation | 05 févr. 2026 | 00:50:50 | |
Lawsuits set public rules; contracts set private ones. A media attorney on how leverage, timing, and context decide the path.
From The New York Times and Perplexity headlines to the practical mechanics of licensing training data, this conversation gets grounded fast. Jason explains what matters most to media companies, what smaller publishers should watch, and why agentic browsing and attribution are shaping up to be the next pressure point. Why this matters: Media is facing a new kind of competition. Not always a stolen article, but a substituted experience. When AI tools summarize, synthesize, and answer in real time, the legal question is not only “Was it copied?” It is also “Does it replace the market for the original?” Jason outlines how courts evaluate that, why “transformative” is both the key term and the messiest one, and why the industry is drifting toward partnerships and licensing frameworks even as litigation continues. At the same time, the next wave is not just training bots or search bots. It is agents that behave like users and may be harder to block or even detect. The more AI becomes the interface to the web, the more urgent it becomes for publishers to understand the business and legal stakes.
Fair use is not a blanket shield. Courts look at purpose, transformation, and market impact, and the facts matter. Legitimate acquisition matters. Even if a use might be transformative, piracy can change the legal posture dramatically. Media’s biggest fear is substitution. Summaries and AI answers can erode subscriptions, traffic, and trust, even without verbatim copying. Deals are becoming more specific. Expect narrower permissions and more constraints on how data can be used for training or product features. Risk is moving through contracts. Indemnification is common, but it is only as strong as the indemnifier’s balance sheet and insurance. Attribution is the missing bridge. A clear “this came from” pathway could reduce conflict and rebuild value for original publishers. Agentic browsing will raise the temperature. When AI acts as a user proxy, blocking and enforcement become harder, and the business questions get sharper.
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026 | |||
| Teaching journalists to use AI without losing critical thinking | 29 janv. 2026 | 00:39:41 | |
A tech-forward journalism professor unpacks how AI is changing how he teaches reporting and what it means for the entry-level jobs that are increasingly endangered. In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Kris Hodgson-Bright, professor of digital communications and media at Lethbridge Polytechnic in Alberta, Canada, to unpack what happens when AI enters the newsroom and the classroom at the same time.
Pete and Kris explore where AI fits in journalism training, where it doesn’t, and why transparent guardrails matter. They also dig into the job market reality for new journalists and communicators, plus the promise of immersive storytelling, including 360-degree video, VR, and photogrammetry, as a way to deepen understanding and empathy. Along the way, the conversation surfaces some of the most difficult questions facing the media right now: how much automation is too much, where responsibility still sits with the human journalist, and how educators can prepare students for an industry that is evolving This is a grounded conversation about the future of media work: hopeful about what AI can enhance, and clear-eyed about the slippery slope toward low quality content and atrophied thinking.
As AI becomes embedded in every part of media, the next generation of journalists and communicators will be judged on more than writing skills. They will be judged on judgment: bias awareness, ethical decision-making, transparency, and the ability to use tools without surrendering the work of thinking.
🔗Kris Hodgson-Bright | Lethbridge Polytechnic To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the freshly updated 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 channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Why Yahoo Still Matters and What It Knows About the Future of News | 16 janv. 2026 | 00:40:41 | |
A candid look at how aggregation, personalization, and trust shape news discovery in an AI-driven internet.
In this Season 4 conversation of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal sits down with Kat Downs Mulder, GM of Yahoo News, to unpack how one of the largest digital media platforms in the world is rethinking aggregation, personalization, and user habits in the age of AI. From audio-first experiences and AI-powered summaries to the integration of Artifact’s technology into the Yahoo News app, Mulder explains how Yahoo is balancing innovation with responsibility while supporting original journalism across a noisy, algorithm-driven ecosystem. Why This Matters AI is no longer just a back-end optimization tool. It is actively shaping how audiences encounter news, how trust is maintained, and how publishers survive. This episode offers a rare inside look at how a major aggregator is navigating those shifts thoughtfully, without racing ahead of the facts or sacrificing credibility. For media leaders, journalists, creators, and product teams, this conversation surfaces real-world lessons about where AI adds value, where human judgment remains essential, and why aggregation still plays a critical role in a healthy information ecosystem. What We Cover in This Episode 👇 • Why Yahoo still matters as a major gateway to news
Kat Downs Mulder 🔗 LinkedIn:
🔗 Speaker Bio (Digital Content Next Summit): 📩 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 channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Best of the Year: Inside the AI Shift that’s Transforming Media and Journalism | 28 déc. 2025 | 00:30:37 | |
• How publishers are navigating AI licensing, attribution, and revenue From conversations with leaders at ProRata, Cloudflare, Taboola, Factiva, and more, this episode captures the real debates happening behind the scenes — beyond the headlines and hype.
If you care about the future of media, the economics of creativity, or how AI is reshaping who gets paid and who gets left behind, this one’s for you. 🎧 Listen now to The Media Copilot: Best of 2025 — and stay tuned for what’s next.
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Can You Trust That Clip? Storyful’s James Law on Verification in the AI Era | 19 déc. 2025 | 00:42:41 | |
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Law explains how verification evolved from the Arab Spring, when social media footage became central to breaking news, to today’s flood of viral clips and AI-generated video designed to look like real eyewitness content. He breaks down Storyful’s verification workflow, why metadata still matters, and how every clip is checked for date, location, and source.
What We Cover - How Storyful verifies video at scale - Why AI detection tools fall short - The role of metadata and raw files - The growing trust problem in digital media - Why authenticity outperforms polish on social platforms
James Law is Editor-in-Chief at Storyful. 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameslaw21/
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Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Practical AI in the Newsroom with Darla Cameron of The Texas Tribune | 12 déc. 2025 | 00:41:20 | |
The surprising places AI helps journalists, and the places it really doesn’t.
Darla comes from a background in data journalism and visual storytelling at places like the Washington Post and now leads product at a nonprofit newsroom that has been experimenting with custom tools, data explorers, and audience-driven experiences for more than a decade. In the wide-ranging discussion, she shares how the Tribune defines product as the interface between content and audience, and how AI and automation are starting to reshape that work without replacing journalists or eroding trust. From transcription tools and meeting analysis to tightly scoped chatbots and AI-narrated stories, Darla walks through what is actually working inside the Tribune, what quietly failed, and the principles that guide every experiment.
For anyone working in media, product, or audience strategy, this conversation is a practical guide to using AI as an assistive layer rather than a replacement. It is about how to adapt to new tools without losing the thing that makes your journalism worth trusting in the first place.
About the Guest Official bio: Texas Tribune – Darla Cameron The Texas Tribune Professional profile: LinkedIn – Darla Cameron
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the channel.
Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Building the Next Era of the Open Web with Adam Singolda | 05 déc. 2025 | 00:42:45 | |
The Taboola CEO explains how USA Today’s DeeperDive changes news discovery, and why publishers might need “chat” after all. AI is rewriting the rules of digital media and few people have had a closer view of the shift than Adam Singolda. In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal has a candid conversation with the Taboola founder about where the open web is headed and why the next era of audience discovery may look nothing like the search driven world we grew up in. Adam has been building Taboola since 2007 and continues to shape one of the largest advertising and recommendation platforms on the open web. He shares what publishers often miss about AI, how performance advertising is evolving, and why trusted media brands may hold more power than ever as chat based discovery becomes mainstream.
Media is in a moment of rapid transition. Search traffic is shifting, conversational queries are becoming a default behavior, and publishers are being pushed to rethink how they attract and retain audiences. Adam offers rare insight from inside a global platform that sits at the center of these changes. He explains how AI is reshaping revenue models, what publishers can do right now to stay competitive, and why this new interaction layer may redefine how journalism is discovered and consumed. What We Cover • Adam’s journey from founding Taboola in 2007 to running a global advertising and recommendation platform More… Learn about Taboola’s mission, how it started — https://www.taboola.com. Taboola.com+1
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamsingolda
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Inside Time’s AI Push: Mark Howard on Building an Agent, Not Just Another Widget | 21 nov. 2025 | 00:51:23 | |
Howard explains how Time approached AI not as a passing trend but as a shift in how journalism will be discovered and consumed. He walks through the decisions behind partnering with AI companies, the work required to safeguard Time’s archive, and how the Time AI Agent grew out of experiments with summaries, translations, and audio briefings. The conversation offers a clear look at the practical choices a legacy media brand faces when it tries to stay trusted in new formats without compromising the reporting that built its reputation.
Learn more The Story Behind the TIME AI Agent
This post was drafted with AI and then carefully edited by Media Copilot editors.
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Reinventing Ads for the Age of AI | 14 nov. 2025 | 00:41:39 | |
In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Michael Rubenstein, Co CEO of Firsthand and one of the original architects of modern ad tech. After helping launch DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange (later acquired by Google), Rubenstein is now building something that feels like the opposite of programmatic advertising, a world where brand “agents” don’t just target you, they talk to you.
This conversation explores how brand agents are transforming advertising into an intelligent, intent driven dialogue, and what that means for publishers, marketers, and the future of media.
X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/mrubenstein99 Listen to the full episode of The Media Copilot with host Pete Pachal and guest Michael Rubenstein on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. (AI-assisted) 📩 Enjoyed this episode?
For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 | |||
| How Newsrooms Are Really Using AI | 07 nov. 2025 | 00:39:25 | |
Inside how AI is actually being used inside media companies today— and what success looks like when it’s done right.
Elvex works with major media companies to build internal AI environments that support reporting, fact-checking, content repurposing, sales operations, research, and product strategy. John has a rare view into the daily shift in how teams work, collaborate, and adapt. This conversation explores: If you work in media, journalism, audience growth, newsroom operations, AI product development, or leadership strategy, this episode breaks down what is actually changing and what is coming next. GUEST: John Levitt
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| The Writing Renaissance: Tony Stubblebine on Medium’s Human Future in the Age of AI | 24 oct. 2025 | 00:47:22 | |
They explore:
If you care about creativity, technology, and the future of storytelling, this is a conversation you should not miss.
For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. 🎧 Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso 🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| AI Wants Your Book. Trip Adler Says It Should Pay. | 17 oct. 2025 | 00:39:24 | |
What if AI could read your book, learn from it, summarize it, and remix it, all with your permission and a paycheck? Trip Adler is working to make that possible. In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal talks with Trip about his latest venture, Created by Humans, a licensing platform that helps AI companies access creative works legally, starting with books. They dive into:
If you're a writer, publisher, AI builder, or just someone who wants creators to get credit and compensation in the AI era, this is the conversation to hear. What You'll Learn Books are emerging as the front line in the battle between human creativity and artificial intelligence and understanding why is key to navigating what comes next. You'll learn how AI rights differ from traditional copyright law and why that distinction matters for anyone working in publishing, media, or technology. It also explains what AI companies can and should be paying to use creative works and how those payments change depending on whether the content is being used for training, reference, or transformation. You will come away with a clearer understanding of why these categories are not interchangeable and why defining each one is essential. Most importantly, the conversation highlights why authors deserve transparency, control, and compensation when their work helps power an AI product.
Co-Founder of Scribd Founder of Created by Humans
Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the channel. For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai.
🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| AI Took the Clicks. Creators Want Them Back. | 10 oct. 2025 | 00:51:46 | |
Raptive powers over 6,000 creators and 200 enterprise publishers and Marc argues that the key to survival isn’t joining the platforms, it’s owning your audience. From the impact of AI Overviews on search traffic to the rise of Google Discover as a quiet growth engine, they break down what’s really happening behind the analytics. Marc also calls out Big Tech’s “free-content” problem, explains why licensing and pay-per-crawl models could reshape revenue, and shares why recipe sites might just be the unsung heroes of the AI era. If you care about the open web, creator independence, or where AI-powered media goes next—this conversation is essential. WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
📩 Enjoyed this episode?
🎧 Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso 🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| From 400 Cities to 2,000: How 6AM City is building a newsletter empire with AI | 03 oct. 2025 | 00:48:20 | |
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
👥 GUEST:
For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai. 🎧 Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso 🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Can AI Fix the News Feed? Cory Ondrejka on NewsArc, Outrage Loops, and Smarter Curation | 19 sept. 2025 | 00:58:02 | |
On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal talks with Cory Ondrejka, former Facebook and Google exec (and co-creator of Second Life), now at SmartNews, where he leads the development of NewsArc; an AI-powered app that curates the best single article on each major news event. No doomscrolling, no junk summaries, and no ragebait. Just clarity, curation, and a front page you can trust. Why this matters now: News avoidance is at record highs, and trust in media is cratering. NewsArc offers an alternative: a shared, AI-assisted “Daily Dozen” that highlights the most informative reads, respects journalistic integrity, and compensates publishers fairly. With LLMs used for claim-checking, not content theft, the app delivers a smarter, calmer news experience for readers who want to be informed, not inflamed. Key Topics: 🔹 Why social feeds broke the news
📩 Enjoyed this episode?
© AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Who Pays When AI Eats the Web? Bill Gross on Zero-Click Search, and the Conversation Layer | 12 sept. 2025 | 00:41:53 | |
AI engines are siphoning off billions in value from publishers. If the 2010s were about gaming Google with SEO, the 2020s are about surviving AI’s takeover of distribution. Global pageviews are down 25% in a year, roughly $100B in value shifted from websites to AI engines without compensation. Bots now outnumber human visitors by staggering ratios, and publishers are footing the bill.
Why this matters now: Web traffic is plunging and is down 250 billion views a day, or about $100 billion a year in lost value. Bots now scrape far more than they give back, with Google at 12:1 and some AI engines hitting 1,200:1, leaving sites like Wikipedia footing huge server bills. Bill Gross’s solution is Gist AI, a publisher-backed search platform with 750 partners, 30 million documents, and a 50/50 revenue share model. Key Topics: 🎙 Guest:
You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Who Controls What You See? AI, Media & Power | 05 sept. 2025 | 00:43:29 | |
🔹 Quality versus “good enough”: AI hallucinations, the shift to AI as the first stop for answers, and what’s at stake when accuracy is the product. 🔹 The “beat China” argument: Why urgency-driven narratives risk steamrolling communities, due process, and environmental review in the name of AI infrastructure. 🔹 Search, remedies, and AI distribution: What Google’s antitrust outcomes could mean for AI-driven search and publisher leverage. 🔹 Where media could go next: Licensing to AI agents, building owned agents, or a future where AI firms hire thousands of journalists themselves. 🔹 Policy capacity and trust: Why the government’s tech knowledge gap matters and how Tech Policy Press is helping close it for lawmakers and regulators. 🔹 Behavior shift: From NPR commutes to chatbot conversations, and the emerging risks of AI companionship and blurred lines between utility and dependency. Guest: Justin Hendrix — CEO/Editor Tech Policy Press :https://www.techpolicy.press/
You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Bot-Blocking to Business-Building: DataDome’s Aurélie Guerrieri on the Intent Layer of AI Traffic | 29 août 2025 | 00:40:16 | |
On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal welcomes Aurélie Guerrieri, Chief Growth Officer at DataDome, a Forrester-recognized leader in bot defense. Together, they dive into the new reality of AI-driven traffic: from LLM crawlers and real-time “prompt-time fetching” to the rising tide of agentic activity that acts on users’ behalf. Instead of framing the debate as simply good bots versus bad bots, the conversation explores a more practical lens: identity versus intent, and how publishers can reclaim control, revenue, and visibility in an internet increasingly shaped by AI distribution. Why this matters now
🔹AI changed the mix of traffic. DataDome sees enormous growth in prompt-time fetching - LLMs hitting your most valuable pages (latest articles, pricing, paywalled previews) 20:1 compared with traditional crawling in some cases.
Key topics: 🔹Why the future of AI governance is about identity and intent, not just “good vs. bad bots”
Aurélie Guerrieri | CGO, DataDome | LinkedIn
You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| The Atlantic’s AI Gamble with Nicholas Thompson | 08 août 2025 | 00:45:44 | |
From “subscriber‐financed stalwart” to AI trailblazer—how The Atlantic built an AI task force, overhauled its search strategy, and struck bold licensing deals to future-proof quality journalism.
Pete and Nick dive into: 🔹 The AI Task Force’s findings on search traffic decline and what it meant for The Atlantic’s business model 🔹 Behind the scenes of The Atlantic’s licensing agreement with OpenAI—and why it ruffled editorial feathers 🔹 How “agents” and personalized AI tools will reshape how readers find and engage with journalism 🔹 The Atlantic’s ethics playbook for AI: rules, guardrails, and editorial oversight 🔹 Striking the balance between subscriber trust, profitability, and fearless experimentation Whether you’re a media professional, tech enthusiast, or simply curious about the future of news, this episode offers rare insight into how a leading publication is plotting its course through one of the most tumultuous eras in media history. 🎙 Guest: Nicholas Thompson | CEO, The Atlantic | https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasthompson 📩 And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app that you want. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, don’t forget to “like” the video and subscribe to the channel 🔔 You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Cloudflare’s Stephanie Cohen on fighting AI scraping | 25 juil. 2025 | 00:41:43 | |
Cloudflare’s move to block AI bots by default could reshape how content is protected online—raising new questions about copyright, scraping, and the future of AI training data. This week on The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal welcomes Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer of Cloudflare, for a conversation that couldn’t be more timely. On July 1st, Cloudflare announced a game-changing move: any new domain hosted on its massive network will automatically block AI bots from scraping content. That’s a major escalation in the growing fight over who gets to access and use data on the internet—and how. Cloudflare is far from a minor player. It routes 20% of global internet traffic, and its decision to restrict bot access by default could redraw the boundaries of the AI economy. As generative AI companies train their models on vast amounts of publicly available content—often without consent—this kind of infrastructural pushback may mark a turning point. Pete and Stephanie dive deep into: 🔹 How Cloudflare identifies and blocks AI bots in real time 🔹 Why this decision matters more than individual publishers adding "robots.txt" 🔹 What enforcement looks like when AI companies try to sneak around restrictions 🔹 The potential ripple effect across the rest of the internet 🔹 Whether we’re heading toward an AI content economy—and what that might look like It’s a conversation that raises urgent questions about digital rights, platform responsibility, and the blurry future of content in the AI era. Whether you're a journalist, technologist, or just someone who cares about the future of the web, this episode is essential listening. 🎙 Guest: Stephanie Cohen | https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanieecohen Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudflare | https://www.cloudflare.com/ 📩 And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app that you want. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, don’t forget to “like” the video and subscribe to the channel 🔔 You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| The AP’s AI playbook: Troy Thibodeaux on liquid content, integrity, and the future of news | 18 juil. 2025 | 00:43:38 | |
From “news wholesaler” to AI innovator—how the Associated Press is adapting to new audience habits, synthetic content, and search-native journalism. This week on The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal sits down with Troy Thibodeaux, Director of AI Products and Services at The Associated Press. A pioneer in AI-powered journalism, Troy has been ahead of the curve—long before ChatGPT made AI a household name. With AI search platforms like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google’s AI Overviews reshaping how people access news, media companies are being forced to rethink their entire approach. But the AP occupies a unique space in the ecosystem: it’s a news wholesaler, serving thousands of outlets rather than individual readers. So when audiences demand instant summaries, auto-generated podcasts, and AI-written rundowns, the AP’s biggest challenge isn’t competition—it’s maintaining editorial integrity across every remix. Pete and Troy unpack: 🔹 How the AP defines “liquid content” and where AI fits in 🔹 The ethical boundaries and red lines around synthetic news 🔹 Why adapting to AI isn’t just a tech problem—it’s a newsroom culture shift 🔹 How the AP’s structure gives it an edge in the AI news arms race If you care about the future of journalism and how legacy institutions are rewriting their rulebooks for an AI-powered era, this episode is essential listening. 🎙 Guest: Troy Thibodeaux Director of AI Products & Services, The Associated Press |https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-thibodeaux/ And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app that you want. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, don’t forget to “like” the video and subscribe to the channel 🔔 You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| No More Doomscrolling: Sara Beykpour on Smarter News with Particle | 11 juil. 2025 | 00:43:49 | |
Inside Particle’s mission to fix the way we consume headlines—with AI summaries, source transparency, and more. This week on The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal welcomes Sara Beykpour, CEO of Particle, an AI-powered news app that’s rethinking what it means to aggregate information in 2025. Unlike traditional aggregators that simply pile stories into a feed, Particle uses artificial intelligence to assemble a comprehensive summary of any given topic—highlighting key facts, surfacing original sources like tweets or trailers, and analyzing bias across coverage. It’s curation with context, and it’s changing how people interact with the news. Pete and Sara dig into: 🔹 What makes Particle different in a long line of aggregator apps 🔹 How “liquid content” turns a 30-minute article into an 8-minute podcast 🔹 The concept of personalized news agents powered by AI 🔹 Why AI is giving users more control than ever over how they consume media Whether you’re in the trenches of journalism, building tools for content creators, or just trying to stay informed in a smarter way, this episode is packed with insight. 🎙 Guest: Sara Beykpour CEO of Particle | Follow on LinkedIn And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app that you want. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, don’t forget to “like” the video and subscribe to the channel 🔔 You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Inside the AI Newsroom: Florent Daudens on Building Tools Journalists Actually Want | 07 juil. 2025 | 00:45:35 | |
Hugging Face’s media liaison talks trust, tech, and why the next great newsroom might look more like a dev team. This week on The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal welcomes Florent Daudens, longtime Canadian journalist and now Press Lead at Hugging Face, the open-source powerhouse behind many of the AI models driving today’s innovation. Florent’s unique position—right at the intersection of the developer world and the newsroom—makes him one of the most insightful voices on how AI is reshaping journalism from the inside out. Before joining Hugging Face, Florent led teams at the CBC, and now he's helping build real tools that actually work for journalists. Pete and Florent dig into: 🔹 How to overcome journalists' lingering skepticism about AI 🔹 Why the line between editorial and product teams is disappearing 🔹 The rise of the “product-minded reporter” 🔹 The future of AI discovery—and what the “Internet of Agents” might look like 🔹 And yes, they talk AIEO—the next evolution of SEO for an AI-driven media landscape Whether you're experimenting with AI tools in your newsroom, navigating editorial strategy in a shifting ecosystem, or just trying to understand what’s next, this conversation is a must-listen. 🎙 Guest: Florent Daudens :https://fdaudens.com/en/index.html Press Lead, Hugging Face Follow him on LinkedIn : https://ca.linkedin.com/in/fdaudens And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app that you want. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, don’t forget to “like” the video and subscribe to the channel 🔔 You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| How AI scrapers are breaking the internet’s honor code, with TollBit’s Toshit Panigrahi | 27 juin 2025 | 00:49:14 | |
There's something in TollBit's latest State of the Bots report that really jumped out at me. The major AI companies—notably Meta, OpenAI, and Google—have essentially given themselves permission to ignore robots.txt for their user agents. In the big picture of AI scraping it might seem like a detail, but it feels to me like a turning point from liberally interpreting the mechanisms for protecting content to brazenly flouting them. I put this question directly to TollBit CEO Toshit Panigrahi when he joined me on this week’s Media Copilot podcast. A little background on TollBit: It’s a startup that specializes in helping publishers monetize their content when AI bots come calling. As everyone knows, the AI internet is rising fast—people are using chatbots to search the web, and those chatbots are giving them answers, not links. And if there was any doubt that this was a fad or not very impactful, Tollbit's most recent State of the Bots report for the first quarter 2025 puts that notion to rest. AI scraping is way up, and it's very quickly becoming comparable to scraping from search engines like Google or Bing. That's one of several eye-opening, and in some cases worrisome, data points in the report, and Toshit and I dive deep into the most important ones. Like I mentioned, AI companies are now starting to openly ignore long-standing internet standards, effectively letting them crawl any "publicly available" content with impunity. What happens if this trend is left unchecked, and what can publishers do about it? We get into all the details, and their implications. If you're stressed about what agents are going to mean for the media ecosystem, you definitely don't want to miss this one. This episode covers:
🎙 Guest: Toshit Panigrahi And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app that you want. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, don’t forget to “like” the video and subscribe to the channel 🔔 You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| The new SEO: Chris Andrew on mastering AI search | 16 mai 2025 | 00:45:38 | |
What does it take to get AI to notice your content? Scrunch AI’s Chris Andrew shares the secret sauce. On this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal welcomes Chris Andrew, CEO of Scrunch AI, to unravel the mysteries of AI-driven search. As AI platforms increasingly summarize news without driving traffic back to publishers, the game of visibility is changing. Chris explains how Scrunch AI is helping content creators understand and optimize for "AI SEO," a new frontier that goes beyond traditional search algorithms. Pete and Chris dive deep into the emerging concept of "SEO for Chatbots"—why AI-generated summaries are redefining content discovery, and how publishers can adapt to avoid getting buried in the noise. They also explore the uncomfortable truth: AI summaries are designed to be self-contained, reducing the need for users to click through to the original source. If you’re a media executive, content strategist, or just curious about the shifting landscape of digital publishing, this conversation is packed with practical insights and bold predictions. This episode covers: 🔹 AI SEO: What it is and why it's the next content battleground 🔹 The Clickless Future: How AI summaries are shifting audience behavior 🔹 Publisher Panic: Why media outlets are scrambling to adapt 🔹 AI’s Surface Area Problem: Fewer sources, fewer clicks, and what that means 🔹 Scrunch AI’s Strategy: How Chris Andrew’s platform is re-engineering content for AI visibility 🔹 New Rules of Engagement: What publishers need to know to stay relevant 🎙 Guest: Chris Andrew -CEO of Scrunch AI Follow him on LinkedIn And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app that you want. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, don’t forget to “like” the video and subscribe to the channel 🔔 You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Building resilient content strategies for publishers with David Buttle and Will Barker | 09 mai 2025 | 01:01:37 | |
AI risk and the tenacity required. In this special episode of The Media Copilot podcast, we're diving into the seismic shifts AI is causing in digital publishing. I recently hosted a webinar on AI Risk and Resilience for Publishers, where we unpacked how AI search engines are disrupting traditional traffic flows and what that means for content creators. The implications are significant: if audiences no longer need to visit publisher platforms to get information, how do publishers maintain visibility and revenue? To explore this challenge, I sat down with David Buttle, founder of DJB Strategies and former Director of Platform Strategy at the Financial Times. David has been at the forefront of analyzing how AI impacts media consumption, and he's developed a methodology to assess risk levels for publishers in an AI-driven world. Joining us is Will Barker of BluConnick, a company focused on enhancing audience engagement through first-party data. Together, we discussed how publishers can create AI-resilient content strategies and maintain their audience relationships in the age of AI-generated summaries. Key Topics Covered:
Listen in as we uncover the roadmap for resilient content in an AI-first world. Whether you're a publisher, content strategist, or media executive, this episode will equip you with the insights needed to navigate this technological shift. And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d encourage you to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app that you want. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, don’t forget to “like” the video and subscribe to the channel 🔔 🎙️ Guests:
You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| How ScalePost’s Ahmed Malik is building an AI survival strategy for media | 02 mai 2025 | 00:50:46 | |
When chatbots summarize your reporting instead of sending audiences to your website, who really wins—and how can creators fight back? Ahmed Malik, CEO of ScalePost, joins The Media Copilot to unpack the act of AI disintermediation. It’s a term that’s thrown around a lot, but it’s just a fancy word for when an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Perplexity writes a summary based on a topic instead of directing a person to a website. That's the basic thing AI services do, but if you think about it, even if the user doesn't have to read the website anymore, the chatbot does. The thing is, chatbots don't look at ads, they don't buy subscriptions, and they sometimes don't even respect paywalls. Because of this simple idea, AI search is rewriting the economics of the web. But what if media companies could push back and get paid? That’s where Malik and ScalePost come in. As a bridge between publishers and AI platforms, ScalePost helps news organizations protect their work, monetize their data, and create a dialogue with the tech companies shaping the future. Ahmed and I break down:
Ahmed also shares insight from ScalePost’s closed-door sessions with major publishers and AI platforms—giving us a rare peek into how the media business is negotiating its future in an AI-dominated landscape. If you’re a journalist, media executive, or content creator wondering how to stay relevant—and solvent—in the age of generative AI, you’ll want to hear this one. - If you’re enjoying The Media Copilot, don’t forget to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leaving a rating or review helps more people discover the show. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe for weekly episodes on how AI is reshaping media, journalism, and content creation. You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||
| Inside Reuters’ AI playbook: Why Jane Barrett says journalism can’t afford to sit this one out | 25 avr. 2025 | 00:45:55 | |
Jane Barrett, Head of AI Strategy at Reuters, joins The Media Copilot to share how one of the world’s largest news agencies is actively shaping the future of AI in journalism—without crossing the line on trust. AI is rewriting the rules of content, but who’s writing the rules for AI in newsrooms? At Reuters, Jane Barrett is making sure they’re not written for them. As Head of AI Strategy, Barrett has led one of the most ambitious and thoughtful integrations of artificial intelligence in a major newsroom—balancing innovation with editorial ethics at every step. This week on The Media Copilot, I talk to Barrett about how Reuters went from “wait and see” to “lead and shape” when it comes to generative AI. From building new workflows to launching the Reuters AI Suite, the global news agency isn’t just experimenting—it’s operationalizing. In our conversation, we cover:
Barrett also shares the internal strategy behind launching AI products for business customers, how trust and transparency guide every deployment, and why AI shouldn’t be viewed as a newsroom shortcut—but a newsroom collaborator. If you’ve ever wondered how legacy media can innovate without compromising its soul, this episode is a masterclass in doing just that. — If you’re enjoying The Media Copilot, don’t forget to follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leaving a rating or review helps more people discover the show. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe for weekly episodes on how AI is reshaping media, journalism, and content creation. You can also subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter (link in show notes) and visit mediacopilot.ai for exclusive resources, tools, and AI training courses built specifically for media professionals. This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License https://filmmusic.io/song/4855-favorite © AnyWho Media 2025 | |||