By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
It may be a sign of my own antiquity, but when I first joined the ranks of journalists in 1983, news publishers were among the richest people and companies in the world.
Flash forward to 2026, as humanity busily creates a (hopefully) benign version of the Terminator villain Sky Net, news organizations are in decline, and mainly act as ‘input companies’ for Large Language Model artificial intelligence bots.
At least, that’s the view of News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson.
News Corp. this month signed an AI licensing deal with Meta that will allow the Meta AI maker to use content from The Wall Street Journal and other brands. That data will allow the information from News Corp.’s various news outlets to be used in its chatbot responses and for training of its AI models.
The deal was first announced in The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp. owns, and after that it was probably announced in searches on Meta’s AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta will pay News Corp. “up to $50 million a year” for a three-year deal that covers content from The Journal, as well as the media giant’s other brands in the US and UK.
Thomson also gave his take on the deal in a generally upbeat presentation at a Morgan Stanley-sponsored tech conference in San Francisco, saying his company was “hard to beat” as a data input for AI.
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“We’re essentially an input company,” Thomson said. “The great threat in the age of AI is going to be to what you might call output companies. We’re an input in the way that semiconductors are an input, in the way that datacentres are an input, in the way that energy is an input. “You look at breaking news, you look at unique real estate information.”
Thomson’s comments came in the days just before News Corp. announced the signing of the deal, and in that context, his comments about the company’s negotiating strategy certainly became more interesting with context.
Thomson described that approach as “a woo and a sue” strategy, depending on whether companies want to pay for content or scrape it without permission.
“We have what you might call a woo and a sue strategy,” he said. “We’ll woo you. We’d like you to be our partner. But if you’re stealing our stuff, we are going to sue you. So there’ll be a discount for those who hand themselves in, and there’ll be a penalty for those that resist.”
The news media has generally seen artificial intelligence and its integration into search engines as an existential threat to its business model, as Google has integrated AI into search, greatly reducing the number of people who click through to news websites.
Some publications, like the New York Times, have decided to combat AI firms in court. The Times is currently suing both Open AI and Microsoft over the unlicensed use of its content to train generative AI models. Others, like the global publication The Guardian, have signed ‘strategic partnerships with a variety of AI companies.