By The Copilot

Can AI help rebuild local journalism before the economics of the industry completely break? Axios does. 

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.”

Murphy argues that the future of local news depends on finding the right balance between human expertise and technological efficiency before the economics of the industry become impossible to sustain.

What We Cover:

 • Why Axios sees AI as essential to saving local journalism economics
 • How one reporter and “half reporter” cities are changing newsroom models
 • The role of AI in reporting workflows, editing, planning, and social distribution
 • Why Axios believes human reporters remain core to its journalism
 • The rise of AI-enabled newsroom operations and internal employee training
 • What media companies still misunderstand about AI adoption
 • Reader trust, transparency, and AI disclosure experiments
 • The future of audience growth and media discovery in an AI ecosystem
 • Why local journalism may become more scalable than ever before

Why this matters:

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.

About the 👤 Guest  

• 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.

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

The media industry has spent years optimizing for clicks, traffic, and scale. But in B2B, the stakes are different.

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

• Why B2B media is moving from impressions to performance-driven outcomes
• The rise of buying groups and how they reshape content strategy
• What “geek chic” means and why measurement is now the differentiator
• How AI acts as a “refiner,” not a replacement, in marketing workflows
• The shift from one-to-many messaging to one-to-one and one-to-few targeting
• Why podcasts and audio are becoming critical in the B2B media mix
• How the “at-work state of mind” blurs personal and professional media consumption
• What publishers are still getting wrong about ROI and measurement
• Why niche, high-intent audiences are more valuable than ever
• The growing role of multi-channel strategies across CTV, social, and audio

About the 👤 Guest  

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 

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?

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

Generative AI can now create high-quality images and videos in seconds. But as the technology accelerates, a more fundamental question is emerging: Can AI-generated media ever be trusted at scale?

In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal speaks with Dr. Yair Adato, founder and CEO of Bria, about a growing divide in the AI ecosystem. On one side are models trained on vast, scraped datasets. On the other are systems built around licensed data, attribution, and control.

At stake is not just quality, but ownership, accountability, and the future economics of creativity.

Why This Matters

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.

As brands, media companies, and enterprises begin to integrate AI into real workflows, concerns around copyright, likeness rights, deepfakes, and data ownership are no longer theoretical. They are operational risks.

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
 • The case for licensed data and a new attribution-driven data economy
 • How generative AI could reshape ownership and compensation for creators
 • Why visual AI presents higher stakes than text models
 • The limits of current models and the push toward greater control and transparency
 • How enterprises are integrating AI into real production workflows
 • The tension between automation and creativity in media and storytelling
 • Why AI will handle the “average” and humans will still define what is exceptional

Notable Insight

“This is by far the most advanced technology humanity has created,” says Dr.  Adato. “…and it took six years, not fifty.”

About the 👤 Guest  

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

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?

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team
Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

AI is no longer experimental in media. It is operational.

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.

In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal talks with Richard Murphy, CEO of the Alliance for Audited Media, to unpack a growing industry response: ethical AI certification.

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.

Drawing from AAM’s newly developed framework, Murphy walks through the pillars of responsible AI use, from transparency and disclosure to human oversight and data protection. The goal is not to slow innovation, but to create guardrails that keep media credible in an era where AI can generate anything.

Why This Matters

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.

What we cover

• What “ethical AI certification” actually means in practice
• The 8 pillars of responsible AI use in media organizations
• Why disclosure is moving from optional to essential
• The difference between AI-assisted vs fully AI-generated content
• Where most trust failures are happening today
• Why self-regulation may be the industry’s best shot before government intervention
• How AI is impacting not just content creation, but distribution and business models
• The growing role of advertisers, partners, and audiences in demanding transparency

About the 👤 Guest  

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/

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?

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team . Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0 All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Colin Jeavons, Founder and Chairman of Nomix Group, to explore what happens when AI becomes the middle layer between publishers and their audiences.

From the collapse of traditional ad economics to the rising value of trust, this conversation breaks down how discovery is evolving, why some publishers may struggle to adapt, and where new opportunities are emerging across commerce, subscriptions, and AI-driven experiences.

What we cover
 • How AI is changing search, discovery, and media economics
 • Why CPM-based advertising is under pressure
 • The growing importance of trust in content
 • The future of subscriptions and micropayments
 • How commerce and AI shopping may evolve
 • What publishers need to rethink right now

Takeaways

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  

🔗 Colin Jeavons  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinjeavons/

🔗 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?

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

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.

What We Cover

 • The shift from traditional search results to AI generated answers
 • What answer engine optimization (AEO) actually means
 • How AI tools break prompts into “fan out” searches
 • Why specificity and structured content matter more than ever
 • The role of citations and consensus in AI responses
 • How platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews choose sources
 • Why Reddit and user generated content still influence AI answers
 • The growing tension between AI discovery and publisher business models
 • Opportunities and risks for media organizations in the AI search era

About the 👤 Guest Josh Blyskal

• Website: https://www.joshblyskal.com

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-blyskal

• X: https://twitter.com/joshblyskal

• Speaker Deck: https://speakerdeck.com/joshbly

Learn More About Profound

• https://www.tryprofound.com

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?

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal speaks with Gina Chua, Executive Editor at Large at Semafor and Executive Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

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.

The conversation also explores how newsrooms can organize large volumes of information. At Semafor, interview transcripts from events and panels are integrated into internal systems so reporters can quickly search conversations, locate quotes, and review context directly.

Chua emphasizes that these tools are designed to assist newsroom work rather than replace editorial judgment. She also offers a useful way to think about large language models: they are built to work with language, not to verify facts. When used carefully with known text sources, they can help summarize, organize, and analyze information.

Beyond newsroom workflows, the discussion turns to the broader shift happening in how people access information. AI tools, chatbots, and automated summaries are increasingly becoming a gateway to news, which raises important questions about trust, verification, and the future role of journalism.

This episode looks at how reporters, editors, and media organizations are adapting as AI becomes part of the information ecosystem.

What we cover
• How Semafor is experimenting with AI tools inside the newsroom
• Using transcripts and Slack to search interviews and discussions
• Why language models are useful for handling text but not verifying facts
• The role of human review in newsroom publishing decisions
• How AI interfaces are changing the way audiences find news

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

About the 👤 Guest GINA CHUA

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

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.

🔍 In this conversation

 • Why Gnomi is built as an “intelligence layer,” not a news app
 • How AI agents could replace search and traditional feeds
 • The danger of engagement driven AI systems
 • Multilingual analysis and global perspective gaps
 • Using social and video data to detect emerging signals
 • Real time market insights from live earnings calls
 • The future of journalism in an AI first world
 • Ads, subscriptions, and the economics of AI tools

If you care about the future of news, AI, finance, or how people will stay informed in the coming decade, this episode is a must watch.

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.

About the 👤 Guest 

LinkedIn

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-cicinyte-1447161b2

Instagram (Personal)

👉 https://www.instagram.com/evapariscicinyte

Official Website

👉 https://www.gnomi.com

LinkedIn (Company Page)

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/company/gnomi

Instagram (Company)
👉 https://www.instagram.com/gnomi.app 

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?

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0All rights reserved. 
© AnyWho Media 2026

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.

Why this matters

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 

🔗Alex Mahadevan 

🔗Poynter / MediaWise 

🔗MediaWise

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?

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

In this episode, Pete Pachal sits down with corporate and transactional attorney Jason Henderson, a streaming and licensing specialist who also happens to be a creative with real skin in the game. Jason breaks down why the popular “AI learns like humans” analogy only goes so far, how fair use really works in court, and why the future will be shaped less by courtroom theory and more by deal structures. The key parts of those deals that are often overlooked: indemnification and who actually bears the risk when things go sideways.

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.

Key Takeaways

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.

👤 Guest
🔗Jason Henderson   
🔗Senior Attorney, JWL International   
🔗Founder, Castle Bridge Media     
🔗Co-host, Castle of Horror podcast (horror movie coverage)

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?

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026

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.

Kris has seen journalism education evolve from high-volume print production to an online first, multi-platform workflow spanning campus news, radio, TV, and emerging formats. Now, he is putting AI directly into the curriculum, not as a shortcut for writing, but as a research assistant that can strengthen reporting, sharpen critical thinking, and help students confront one of the biggest challenges in modern media: bias and trust.

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 
faster than any syllabus. 

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.

Why this matters

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.

What we cover

• How journalism education shifted from print heavy production to online-first publishing

• The right way to integrate AI into student workflows without outsourcing the writing

• Using AI to check for bias and improve historical context in local reporting

• What transparency and disclosure should look like in AI-assisted media

• Media law, ethics, privacy, and how to teach responsible AI use

• Why the journalism job market is harder and what students can do to stand out

• Immersive journalism, empathy, and what VR still gets right even without mass adoption

• Kris’s hopes and fears about AI’s long-term impact on media

👤 Guest

🔗Kris Hodgson-Bright | Lethbridge Polytechnic

🔗Kris Hodgson-Bright (@hodgsonkr) / Posts / X

🔗krishodgsonbright/LinkedIN 

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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025

Yahoo has been part of the internet’s front door for more than two decades. But what does it mean to guide audiences through news today, when consumption is fragmented, trust is fragile, and AI is reshaping how information is found, summarized, and shared?

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
 • How AI is reshaping content aggregation and personalization
 • Why audio is becoming a powerful habit-building news format
 • What Yahoo learned from integrating Artifact into its app
 • How AI summaries drive deeper engagement rather than replace it
 • Balancing speed, scale, and trust in AI-driven news products
 • How publishers and creators coexist inside Yahoo’s ecosystem
 • Why user behavior matters more than age or demographics
 • What an agent-driven web means for the future of news discovery

👤 Guest

Kat Downs Mulder
General Manager, Yahoo News : https://news.yahoo.com/ 

🔗 LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katdowns

🔗 X (formerly Twitter):
https://x.com/katdowns 

🔗 Yahoo Press Announcement:
https://www.yahooinc.com/press/yahoo-appoints-kat-downs-mulder-as-svp-amp-general-manager-of-yahoo-news

🔗 Speaker Bio (Digital Content Next Summit):
https://events.digitalcontentnext.org/next-summit-2023/speaker/636864/kat-downs-mulder

📩 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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025

This special episode of The Media Copilot is a look back at the conversations that defined the past year...the questions, tensions, and turning points shaping how media, journalism, and technology intersect right now.

Over the past year, Pete has spoken with some of the sharpest minds working at the center of AI, publishing, and platform design. And while the tools keep evolving, the same core questions kept resurfacing:

How should creators and publishers be compensated in an AI-driven world?
Where does transparency end and exploitation begin?
Who actually controls the future of information, and who should?

In this Best Of episode, you’ll hear standout moments from those conversations, including:

 • How publishers are navigating AI licensing, attribution, and revenue
 • Why the rise of AI agents and scraping tools is forcing a rethink of digital rights
 • The growing tension between innovation and consent
 • What ethical AI actually looks like in practice, not theory
 • Why human judgment, context, and trust still matter more than ever

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.

🎙️ Featured Voices 

• Bill Gross – Founder & CEO, ProRata
• Annelies Jansen – Chief Business Officer, ProRata
• Mark Howard – Chief Operating Officer, Time (formerly Time Inc.)
• Adam Singolda – CEO, Taboola
• Toshit Panigrahi – CEO & Co-Founder, Tolbit
• Aurélie Guerrieri – Chief Marketing & Alliances Officer, Cloudflare
• Stephanie Cohen – Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudflare
• Mark Riley – Founder & CEO, Mathison AI
• Traci Mabrey – General Manager, Factiva
• Trip Adler – Founder & CEO, Created by Humans

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.

📩 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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025

Please support the sponsor of this podcast: PodPitch.com is a software that thousands of people use today to book podcasts with a 4% booking rate. It’s the most updated podcast email database and it comes with a custom-trained AI that learns YOUR voice and applies what works from more than 10 million previous pitches to optimize your own reply rate. Now one comms pro has the power of a 10-person team.

Join Golin, Weber, Edelman, Finn, Broadhead, 5W and more in seeing a live demo today.

Click here now to book time to check out PodPitch: https://new.podpitch.com/mediacopilot

In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal talks with James Law, Editor-in-Chief of Storyful, about how newsrooms verify social and user-generated video in an era of AI, deepfakes, and viral misinformation.

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.

They also discuss the limits of AI detection tools, the rise of “harmless” synthetic videos that erode trust, and why authenticity and transparency matter more than ever for newsrooms.

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

About the Guest

James Law is Editor-in-Chief at Storyful.

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameslaw21/
🔗 X: https://x.com/JournoLawJ
🔗 https://storyful.com/about/

📩 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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025

AI in journalism can feel abstract until you talk to the people actually shipping products inside newsrooms. In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal talks with Darla Cameron, Chief Product Officer at The Texas Tribune, about what happens when AI meets real reporting, real audiences, and real constraints.

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.

Why This Matters

News organizations are being squeezed from all sides. Reporters are expected to cover more with fewer resources. Audiences are drifting into AI-powered interfaces that sit between publishers and their readers. At the same time, trust in institutions is fragile and any perceived shortcut can damage a brand that took years to build.

Darla offers a grounded reality check from inside a newsroom that is embracing experimentation while drawing clear lines. The Tribune has an AI policy that explicitly says AI will not replace journalists. They do not use AI to generate news stories or images. They are very deliberate about where automation helps and where human judgment is non negotiable.

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.

What We Cover

• Why “product” matters in a newsroom and how it links journalism, design, and audience engagement.

• Real-world examples: using AI to transcribe interviews or analyze podcasts for reporting.

• What The Texas Tribune’s AI policy looks like: when automation helps, and when human verification is essential.

• Why the Tribune refuses AI-generated images and prefers real photography for accountability and trust.

• Lessons from building chatbots and interactive tools — including what worked, what didn’t, and what the team learned.

• How audience feedback guides when and how to use AI, especially in a nonprofit news model.

About the Guest

Official bio: Texas Tribune – Darla Cameron The Texas Tribune 

Professional profile: LinkedIn – Darla Cameron

📩 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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025

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.

Why This Matters

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
• How Taboola positions itself as the performance engine of the open web
• What the company has learned about audience behavior across thousands of publishers
• How AI is changing advertising performance, engagement, and publisher economics
• The impact of declining search traffic and the rise of chat based discovery
• The creation of Taboola’s Deeper Dive experience and how users actually interact with AI on news sites
• Why publishers need to experiment with AI quickly or risk losing ground
• How trust and brand identity give premium publishers an advantage in the AI era
• What adoption looks like when you introduce AI directly into media workflows
• The future of LLM monetization and why Adam sees a major opportunity for journalism

More…

Learn about Taboola’s mission, how it started — https://www.taboola.com.     Taboola.com+1 

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamsingolda

📩 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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025

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.

What we cover in this episode
 • How Time decided to negotiate with AI companies instead of taking an adversarial stance
 • The behind-the-scenes systems created to protect IP and track bot activity
 • The evolution from Person of the Year experiments to daily AI audio briefings to the Time AI Agent
 • Why the agent is grounded only in Time’s archive and what that means for accuracy and trust
 • How Time is approaching AI marketplaces, enterprise licensing, and the agent to agent web
 • What this shift means for the newsroom, editorial workflows, and audience relationships

Learn more
 Mark Howard on Time
 https://time.com/author/mark-howard

The Story Behind the TIME AI Agent
 https://time.com/7332572/the-story-behind-the-time-ai-agent

Mark on LinkedIn
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdhoward

Mark on X
 https://x.com/markdhoward 

This post was drafted with AI and then carefully edited by Media Copilot editors.

📩 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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025

We’ve spent decades trying to make digital advertising smarter. Cookies, pixels, and data exchanges promised personalization but delivered clutter, tracking fatigue, and declining returns. Then came AI, bringing the chance not just to improve ads, but to completely reimagine how brands and audiences interact.

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.

Instead of static banners or pre-rolls, these AI-driven brand agents act like adaptive digital representatives that engage, inform, and even create content on the fly. They’re built to live anywhere, inside a publisher’s story, across a retailer’s site, or within a chat experience, meeting consumers wherever they are and responding in real time to what they actually want.

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.

What We Cover:
 • How AI driven brand agents are changing advertising and media engagement
 • Why this new model removes invasive tracking and builds real consumer trust
 • How publishers can use adaptive experiences to grow audience value
 • Why AI represents not automation but communication
 • The cultural and ethical stakes of rebuilding advertising around AI conversations

In Closing
 AI is taking down the old walls of the Internet. The question isn’t whether advertising and publishing will change, it’s whether they can adapt fast enough to stay relevant.

The future, as Rubenstein says, isn’t programmatic, it’s personal.

Connect with Michael Rubenstein:
 🔗 Firsthand.ai
💼 LinkedIn – Michael Rubenstein

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.
 👉 Visit mediacopilot.ai for more on our classes, insights, and upcoming episodes.

(AI-assisted)

📩 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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, Pete Pachal speaks with John Levitt, COO of Elvex, about how AI is actually being adopted inside newsrooms and media organizations today. Not the hype. Not the pitch deck version. The real workflows happening behind the scenes.

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:
 • How editorial, business, and product teams are already using AI
 • Why culture and leadership framing determine whether AI succeeds
 • Where AI reduces repetitive work without replacing journalists
 • What "context engineering" means and why it matters more than prompts
 • How media companies can experiment with AI safely and responsibly
 • The next shift toward agent-to-agent workflows and personalized news experiences

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
https://www.elvex.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmlevitt/ 

📩 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
Edited by the Musso Media Team 

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2025

Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium, joins The Media Copilot with Pete Pachal to talk about the new reality of writing in an AI world. As algorithms reshape how stories are created and shared, Stubblebine believes we are entering a writing renaissance where technology helps writers stay focused, authentic, and connected to their readers.

They explore:

• The collapse of free-content economics and the rise of the post-Google internet

• Why Medium is betting on smaller, more human writing communities

• How AI can enhance creativity rather than erase it

• The tools that will keep writers in flow and make the act of writing joyful again

If you care about creativity, technology, and the future of storytelling, this is a conversation you should not miss.

📩 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
 🎬 Edited by the Musso Media Team
© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved.

🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© AnyWho Media 2025

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:

• How AI companies are scraping content without permission

• What “AI rights” actually are and why creators need to define them now

• Why licensing for training, RAG (reference), and transformation should all be separate

• How Trip’s “Fourth Law of Robotics” could reset the power dynamic between human and machine

• What the $3,000-per-book Anthropic case tells us about future settlements

• And why this could be the next big revenue stream for authors and publishers

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.

GUEST:  Trip Adler

Co-Founder of Scribd

Founder of Created by Humans 
 🔗 createdbyhumans.ai | LinkedIn 

📩 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
 🎬 Edited by the Musso Media Team
© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved.

🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© AnyWho Media 2025

In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Marc McCollum, Chief Growth Officer at Raptive, to talk about the future of media in the age of AI.

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:

• Why AI summaries are crushing clicks—and what to do about it
• How creators can stay profitable when SEO and affiliate models fall short
• Why owning your site and email list is still your best move
• What Raptive’s data reveals about traffic winners and losers in 2025
• The quiet power of Google Discover and how to make it work for you

   GUEST:  Marc McCollum, Chief Growth Officer, Raptive
   🔗 raptive.com | LinkedIn
  
  

📩 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
 🎬 Edited by the Musso Media Team
© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved.

🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© AnyWho Media 2025

In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal talks with Ryan Heafy, co-founder of 6AM City, about how his team is flipping the script on community journalism—using AI to scale responsibly while keeping human editorial judgment at the center.

Discover how they’ve expanded from a few test cities to 410+ local markets with a “Seed-to-Profit” model, how their anti-scraping strategy builds trust from the ground up, and why they just acquired controversial AI startup Good Daily—not for the headlines, but for the infrastructure.

Whether you're in media, tech, marketing, or just want smarter news in your inbox, this one's for you.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• How 6AM City uses AI to launch, test, and scale new markets

• Why newsletters are the future of local media—and why most will fail

• How 6AM avoids outrage bait and click-driven news

• What they really got from acquiring Good Daily

• How to build content that survives Gmail filters, TikTok scrolls, and voice assistants

• Why their inbox model might outlast traditional journalism

👥 GUEST:
 Ryan Heafy — Co-Founder & Chief Local Officer, 6AM City
 🔗 LinkedIn | 🌐 6amcity.com

📩 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
 🎬 Edited by the Musso Media Team
© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved.

🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© AnyWho Media 2025

For years, the way we consume news has been warped by engagement algorithms that reward outrage and overwhelm. With attention hijacked and trust eroding, millions have simply tuned out. But what if AI could help fix what it broke?

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
🔹 How NewsArc uses AI to elevate not replace journalism
🔹 The problem with summaries and the power of “claim-level” analysis
🔹 Why a shared front page matters in a polarized world
🔹 How SmartNews compensates publishers in the LLM era

🎙 Guest:
 Cory Ondrejka | EVP, SmartNews / Creator of NewsArc
LinkedIn | smartnews.com 

📩 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
 🎬 Edited by the Musso Media Team
© 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved.

🎵 Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

© AnyWho Media 2025

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.

On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal talks with Bill Gross, founder of ProRata and creator of Gist AI, an ethical AI search platform backed by 750 publishers. Gross makes the case for a new deal: pay publishers when AI crawls their sites, share revenue when AI uses their work, and build experiences that move beyond “ten blue links” to true conversations with audiences.

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:
 🔹 The economics of zero-click search
 🔹 Why one-time licensing checks won’t sustain publishers
 🔹 How “sponsored supplements” could reinvent ads in AI answers
 🔹 Why publishers should stop chasing SEO tricks and focus on true value
 🔹 What Gross calls the “conversation layer” and why it’s the next big battleground

🎙 Guest:
 Bill Gross | Founder & CEO, ProRata | https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgrossidealab 

https://gist.ai/ 

https://prorata.ai/ 

📩 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  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

On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal welcomes Justin Hendrix, CEO and editor of Tech Policy Press, a nonprofit dedicated to provoking debate at the intersection of technology and democracy. Hendrix’s path from The Economist to NYC Media Lab to founding a policy newsroom, shapes a rare perspective; he speaks policy, product, and press. Who sets the rules for AI and media—industry, government, or the public? Justin Hendrix argues the answer starts with competition policy and ends with better equilibria for democracy.

Topics we cover

🔹 Copyright and AI training: The battle between fair use and “giant theft,” why the U.S. path may be decided in court, and how commercialization complicates the ethics.

 🔹 Power concentration: How antitrust and the Digital Markets Act could serve as tectonic levers to rebalance control between platforms and publishers.

 🔹 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/ 

📩 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  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

If the last two years were about discovering that AI agents are vacuuming up the web, the next two will be about deciding what to do about it. Do you block, meter, license - or build your own agent and make the bots pay?

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

🔹Scale & speed broke the old defenses. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs - servers that cache and deliver website content from locations closer to users) and Web Application Firewalls (WAFs - security systems that filter and monitor HTTP traffic between users and web applications) still matter, but they adapt in minutes. Attackers now act in seconds and from distributed IPs that look like everyday users.

🔹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.

🔹The business model is shifting. “Open web” ≠ “open season.” Publishers need to decide who gets access, for what, and at what price - and they need tooling that can enforce those choices in real time.

“AI is part of the problem—and part of the solution. We use AI to fight AI.”    -  Aurélie Guerrieri

How can publishers fight back against AI bots—and turn them into new revenue streams instead of lost traffic?

Key topics:

🔹Why the future of AI governance is about identity and intent, not just “good vs. bad bots”
🔹How prompt-time fetching targets publishers’ most valuable content in real time
🔹The rise of agentic activity and why it can be both powerful and dangerous
🔹Why static defenses like content delivery networks (CDNs) and web application firewalls (WAFs) are being outpaced
🔹How DataDome uses AI to fight AI, stopping more attacks and restoring visibility
🔹New monetization models: pay-per-fetch, APIs, and even building owned agents
🔹Lessons from Cloudflare vs. Perplexity and what they mean for publisher control
🔹Guerrieri’s advice to media leaders: measure, control, and experiment

Her bottom line: the future of publishing isn’t about keeping bots out, but about shaping how they come in—and making them pay for the privilege.

🎙 Guest:

 Aurélie Guerrieri | CGO,  DataDome | 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

This week on The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, to unpack how one of America’s most storied publications is navigating the AI revolution. Under Nick’s leadership, The Atlantic has become a rare legacy‐media success story—profitable, subscriber-driven, and bold in its AI strategy. From launching an internal task force post-ChatGPT to pivoting away from Google-first traffic, to striking a licensing deal with OpenAI despite staff unease, The Atlantic’s journey offers a playbook in balancing journalistic integrity, business sustainability, and technological innovation. Nick brings both enthusiasm for AI’s potential and a clear-eyed realism about its impact on news discovery and trust.

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

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

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

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

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

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:

• Why AI bots are ignoring robots.txt and what it means for publishers right now

• How the rise of agent-based scraping is quietly reshaping the open web

• The surprising data behind how much AI scrapers take vs. how little they give back

• What a “new value exchange” with AI looks like and how publishers might get paid

• Where all this is headed if nothing changes — and what needs to happen next

🎙 Guest: Toshit Panigrahi
CEO of TollBit
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

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

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:

• The rise of AI-driven search and its impact on publisher traffic

• How to identify content most at risk for AI substitution

• Strategic approaches to maintain audience loyalty and engagement

• Leveraging first-party data to optimize reader experience
  

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:

• David Buttle

  Founder of DJB Strategies

  Former Director of Platform Strategy at Financial Times

  LinkedIn Profile

  DJB Strategies Website

  
  

• Will Barker

  Manager for Customer Success at BluConnick

  LinkedIn Profile

  BluConnick Website

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

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:

• The hard truth about how AI is siphoning traffic—and what bot activity means for the future of metrics
  

• Why evergreen content is especially vulnerable to AI disruption
  

• What ScalePost is doing to make private deals and licensing discussions possible
  

• How media companies are thinking beyond lawsuits to carve out new business models
  

• What the Ziff Davis lawsuit against OpenAI signals for the industry at large
  

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

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:

• How Reuters got its 2,500+ journalists to embrace AI tools without fearing obsolescence
  

• Why generative video and imagery are off-limits—and what that says about editorial values
  

• The tension between using AI for speed and preserving the nuance of human reporting
  

• Why Reuters’ B2B AI Suite is less about automation and more about augmentation
  

• The hard truths about “publicly available” content and how publishers are fighting back
  

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

The media business is no stranger to disruption—but AI is changing the rules of engagement faster than most companies can respond. At Dotdash Meredith, Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Jonathan Roberts is trying to stay not just afloat, but ahead. This week on The Media Copilot, I talk with Jonathan about how one of the biggest names in digital publishing is confronting—and capitalizing on—AI’s rapid rise.

Dotdash Meredith is home to household-name brands like People, InStyle, and Investopedia. But behind the glossy covers and evergreen SEO content is a highly engineered operation—one that’s been data-forward for years. From its proprietary ad tech platform D/Cipher (built to thrive in a post-cookie world) to deep integrations with OpenAI, the company is betting on innovation as its survival strategy.

In our conversation, we cover:

• Why Dotdash leaned into its OpenAI partnership early—and how it’s paying off in real-time
  

• The evolving relationship between editorial integrity and algorithmic optimization
  

• How personalization at scale is being done without compromising trust or quality
  

• What AI agents mean for traffic, SEO, and the entire structure of online publishing
  

• Whether we’re heading toward a future where humans don’t browse websites—they just ask
  

Jonathan shares how Dotdash is adapting its product, content, and monetization models to survive in an environment where Google is no longer the gateway to the internet—and where AI summaries may be the only thing standing between your brand and invisibility.

We also talk about what’s not changing: the need for trusted, human storytelling—and the critical role publishers still play in shaping how information flows online. But how do you fund it? That’s the tension we explore.

This is a candid, smart look at the state of play in media innovation—one that pulls back the curtain on how digital publishers are rethinking their entire business to meet the moment.

—

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

This week on The Media Copilot, I sat down with Steven Brill, a legend in the journalism world and co-founder of NewsGuard, the company working to restore trust in news. Steven’s media legacy includes launching Court TV, creating American Lawyer magazine, and authoring bestsellers on health care, education, and much more. But his latest focus? Making sense of AI’s impact on information integrity.

In this episode, we dive into:

• The bombshell NewsGuard report exposing a Russian propaganda campaign that infiltrated AI training data
  

• What this means for platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity
  

• How to fight misinformation inside the machine
  

• Whether NewsGuard itself can stay unbiased — and how it handles critics
  

• What’s next for NewsGuard in the AI era (including an exclusive announcement: NewsGuard’s TrueNews AI, a small language model that indexes only sites NewsGuard deems “not unreliable”)
  

If you care about the future of media, credibility, and the truth itself in a world shaped by AI, this is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

Listen now to hear from Steven Brill on the fight to keep our information ecosystem clean — and how we all have a role to play.

Coming up: Free Webinar – April 10

I'm also hosting a live webinar on Thursday, April 10 with David Buttle, founder of DJB Strategies. We'll be taking a deep dive into AI substitution risk — how AI-powered search engines are summarizing the news, killing clicks, and reshaping publisher economics.

We'll cover:

• What types of content are most at risk
  

• Why AI search is disrupting audience engagement
  

• Tactical strategies to protect and future-proof your content business
  

Visit mediacopilot.ai to register and secure your spot.

The Media Copilot is a podcast and newsletter that explores how generative AI is changing media, journalism, and the news.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to The Media Copilot newsletter.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Explore our courses⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on how to use AI tools, tailored for media, marketers, PR professionals, and other content creators.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on X.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Subscribe to the podcast on:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Other podcast apps⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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