The Diplomat
The first webinar organized by Editored – which brings together editors from Europe and Latin America – concluded that achieving journalism with high standards is one of the keys to the survival of the media in the era of networks, GPT chat and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In a virtual meeting held last Monday, with the participation of editors from European and Latin American media, the initial presentation was given by Florian Nehm, head of Public Affairs of the German group Axel Springer, promoter of actions aimed at providing economic sustainability to the media.
In the webinar it was highlighted that, along with the need to compete with high-level journalism, it is necessary to negotiate together with the large technology platforms and have national and regional legislation that establishes fair payment by the Internet giants for the lucrative use they give to the work of journalists and the media.
These three aspects – it was emphasized – are essential to give economic viability to the media, which are the ones that pay the salaries of the journalists who create high-value content, while the technological platforms are the ones that reap the profits of that professional work.
Thus, it was indicated that the large Internet platforms (Google, Meta, X, among others) attract their consumers, to a large extent, with the journalistic information created by the newsrooms. They develop businesses with that professional work without financially compensating its creators. As a consequence, the sustainability of the journalistic media has been put at serious risk. Not that of some in particular, but that of everyone.
For this reason, Nehm says, the motto, the objective that various editors’ associations are pursuing is “to achieve economic viability so that a diversity of journalistic offers can be sustained, fundamental for democracy.”
The need for professional journalism
“It would be terrible if few media outlets survived,” says Nehm. Let there be “news deserts.” “Competition causes errors to be corrected, approaches to be completed. Journalists do not like to be left with incomplete or untrue information; They know that no one has the final truth and they look for more sources and more news. That is fundamental for democracy.”
The fight, he insists, is to ensure that “our competition can continue to be our competition.”
Regulations are needed to encourage this dynamic, said Nehm. Laws are required to stop what, in general, can be called piracy, which consists of other media or modern computer systems using or copying for their benefit the content created by journalists paid by their publishing houses.
“What we want,” Nehm stated, “is for an equitable share of the profits that the platforms achieve with our content, produced with our salaries, to be granted to us, under legal protection, with modern, stable and effective laws, so that media are independently sustainable and democracy does not suffer.”
After pointing out that in Latin America there are no experiences with regulations that are responsible for protecting payment for journalistic content in the era of powerful search engines, Nehm pointed out that in Europe there are experiences, although, in general, they are unfinished tasks.
The European Copyright Directive, for example, fails to be fully established. It began in 2010 with legislation in Germany, then followed by one in Spain. It was later adopted by the European Commission, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed its implementation in the Union. Poland has not yet implemented it. “But it is weak regulation,” says Nehm.
The Union also issued the Digital Services Law which, among other things, requires social networks to effectively control so that false information is not published.
The example of Australia and Canada
Australia has taken a strong legal initiative since 2020. It is different from the European one, which according to Nehm has clearer force. And it has given good results, although still not ideal.
In the United States there is no favorable outlook for initiatives of this type, because there is a law that prohibits the media from negotiating together because it is considered that there is a danger of a monopoly.
A law on AI
Europe is preparing a directive on Artificial Intelligence, but for now it only proposes regulating the “output”, what is already out to the public, for a kind of risk control.
The European associations of publishers seek to include elements of the “input”, that is, to establish the conditions that must be met by those who use Generative Artificial Intelligence, the transparency requirements that the digital economy sector must observe. “But we have not achieved it yet,” acknowledges Nehm, who hopes that elements like these can be included during Spain’s temporary presidency of the European Council.
“The editors have made an effort to come up with arguments to include these aspects in the new directive. Regardless of whether we manage to have them considered in the final text or not, the mental and coalition exercise that has been generated in the face of the laws that are coming will be important,” explained Nehm.
And a new opportunity is not far away. In 2026, a review of the Intellectual Property Directive must take place by legal mandate.
Neither Europe nor Australia nor Canada alone can achieve the legal changes that allow media sustainability. “We need to unite and we need action from Hispanic and Brazilian society,” Nehm said. Together, he expressed, we form the largest group of countries with democratic culture left in the world, beyond political ups and downs. “It is the region that contains the values of freedom, which are the basis for the free press and for its economic viability to function.” The Latin American media must “roll up their sleeves,” he said, and work hard to achieve better conditions that allow their long-term functioning.
Negotiate together
Technology platforms, says Nehm, have acted to divide publishers, who have not joined forces to improve their negotiating capacity.
He therefore proposes that the media strengthen their organizations, associations, federations and that as a group they negotiate better conditions with the big technology companies that enrich themselves with the journalistic work of others.
“The ideal is to achieve mandatory management company status,” says Nehm. That is, joint negotiation is mandatory. This implies something that is still difficult to achieve: that the media give up their freedom to negotiate individually. “That is still a very slow process,” he accepted. But he hopes that media organizations, including those of journalists, will negotiate with the legislatures and governments of their countries or regions to promote laws that achieve justice in this field.
Nehm told a recent case that he knew about: entrepreneurs in the South American energy field went to a small European company that develops Artificial Intelligence. They were looking for an automatic system that reviews what is published in the US, Europe and Asia about the hydrocarbon market, in the media and in scientific research. And that this becomes a report that allows the company to permanently analyze the conditions of that market.
That is, normally, the work that companies’ communication and monitoring offices did, for which they required a large number of people, who delivered weekly reports. This Artificial Intelligence is capable of “scanning” all that information worldwide and issuing reports every 10 minutes.
But for this AI to work, it requires that there first be that reliable, verified and contrasted information, which is what the specialized media produces.
