By Brian Veseling and Valérie Arnould

In a webinar moderated by Ezra Eeman, former Google news ecosystem lead Madhav Chinnappa argued that the media industry is moving from an “Era of Traffic” into an “Era of GenAI” – and that the old value exchange has broken down.

In the Era of Traffic, Chinnappa told participants, the basic deal essentially boiled down to tech companies being allowed to crawl news publisher’s sites in exchange for traffic.

There was a degree of control, he added, “and at least in the early days of the internet, it was good for legitimate content creation.”

However, in the era we are in now, which Chinnappa calls the Era of GenAI, he says “I don’t know what the value exchange is. I don’t know what the control is. And personally, I am deeply, deeply worried about what this means for legitimate content creation.”

“I think what’s heart-breaking in the Era of GenAI is that news is not valued as much as we would all want it to be,” he told webinar participants.

WAN-IFRA Members can rewatch the presentation and discussion on our Knowledge Hub. And Chinnappa will lead a panel discussion during WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress on 2nd June, with Le Monde CEO Louis Dreyfus and other leading executives. Register here.

Unfortunately, though, “news is not a revenue driver. Therefore, on the priority list, it’s pretty far down (for platforms),” Chinnappa said.

To counter this, he said, news publishers need to come up with a product solution, and they need to do it pretty quickly.

“We don’t want to sleep walk into this world we’re talking about,” Chinnappa said.

Using a provocative label (“NATO for News”), he proposed a collective response built on three principles:

• Country-level collaboration – publishers in each country come together.
• A product with real value – something foundation model companies would be willing to pay for, not feel forced to pay for.
• Medium-to-long-term optimisation – prioritising ecosystem sustainability over short-term tactics.

He framed four starting questions: what, who, how, and how much.

‘Access, not copyright’

A key distinction in his argument: this should be built around access, not content/copyright.

Chinnappa said focusing on copyright leads to years of litigation, whereas access can be positioned as a product relationship. He pointed to the Google–Reddit deal and Wikipedia’s deals as examples he sees as “about access.”

Responding to a question from an audience member on what this product actually looks like, Chinnappa said, “It’s paying for access to an API (Application Programming Interface).”

Chinnappa made an analogy to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent speech in Davos: there’s no going back from the current evolution we are witnessing and the news industry is at best a middle power in the new socioeconomic, geopolitical dynamic that we’re part of. If you take into account those two elements then you need to operate pragmatically but with principles. That’s what NATO for News is about.

“What happens in five years if we don’t get this?” asked moderator Eeman.

“My worry is that news producers essentially enter into a feudal relationship where the tech companies are the powerful overlords and the publishers are the serfs,” Chinnappa said.

His goal is to “break the hierarchy” and move toward a more collaborative model.

A structural consequence: Two audiences

Chinnappa predicted publishers will increasingly have two audiences:

• a human audience, monetised through subscriptions and advertising
• a bot/agent audience, monetised through access and usage

He positioned his model as a way for publishers to monetise that second audience.

Negotiation realities: divide-and-conquer dynamics

In discussion, Chinnappa noted tech companies use classic divide-and-conquer tactics, citing the example of “one deal per country” as a negotiating strategy.

He suggested that if there is “one deal,” it should be a collective deal.

Pricing: still unclear, but structured data raises value

Chinnappa was blunt that no credible universal pricing method has emerged. He described pricing as closer to an “art” than a science, noting that media pricing historically varies widely.

He suggested publishers could at least model the value of search referrals and scenario-plan a “Google Zero” world to estimate what would need replacing.

Kevin Anderson, the director of WAN-IFRA’s Digital Revenue Network, added observations from our recent AI Study Tour to the Silicon Valley: pricing variability in some licensing contexts appears to be narrowing, and companies structuring/enriching data claim significantly higher value for structured content.

Both Chinnappa and Anderson reinforced the point: structured data is foundational.

“If you remember one thing from my presentation, it’s structured data,” Chinnappa said.

Overall, he stressed that “much more thought is needed. I’m doing this because I think it’s important. But let’s be clear: This is very, very hard.”

Launch of SPUR media coalition

Interestingly, on the same day as the webinar, the leaders of five major UK-based news companies (The Guardian, FT, BBC, Telegraph and Sky News) released an open letter announcing the creation of SPUR: – the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights – and called on global news leaders “to come together to protect original journalism.”

“Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally reshaping how content is created, distributed, discovered and monetised,” the letter states. “We believe we need to come together to protect original journalism and secure the long-term sustainability of our industry.”

SPUR’s mission is “to establish shared technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks that ensure AI developers can access high quality, reliable journalism in legitimate, responsible and convenient ways, while guaranteeing that publishers retain practical control of their content and receive fair value when it is used.”

Read more:  Guardian joins media coalition to protect original journalism from unpaid use by AI