The Media Copilot

Blocking the bots is step one. People Inc.'s Jonathan Roberts on what comes next: the companies reselling publisher content, who sets the price, and why AI is spending its money in the wrong place. Pete Pachal talks with Jonathan Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc. (People, InStyle, Investopedia), about blocking every bot by default and allowing 38 through, the disguises blocked bots...

When AI answers the question, publishers lose more than the click. Bombora's Jaime Schultheis on why AI referrals convert, why Google is a shaky foundation, and what AI companies should give publishers besides a check. Pete Pachal talks with Jaime Schultheis, head of global data partnerships at Bombora, about what Bombora's publisher data shows (steeper referral declines, more bots, niche B2B titl...

Rob Kelly tracks 99 AI licensing deals. What publishers are really selling now, and why OpenAI may settle with the Times. Kelly, the creator and host of Media & the Machine, keeps a spreadsheet of 99 AI content licensing deals, from The New York Times' little-discussed $100 million Google arrangement to Yelp's new deal with OpenAI. He ran the content licensing business at CMP Media, so he know...

Bot traffic has already passed human traffic on the web. Oasy co-founder Choy Travers thinks publishers should stop blocking the bots and start selling them ads. Pete Pachal talks with Choy Travers, co-founder of Amsterdam-based Oasy, about a new kind of advertising: sponsored content served to AI crawlers on a publisher's site, on the bet that the AI will use it when answering a user's question....

Bot traffic passed human traffic on the web this year. TIME decided to sell the bots ads. One month in, COO Mark Howard explains what advertisers are buying, why the AI seems to remember what it scrapes, and what Perplexity got wrong. Pete Pachal talks with Mark Howard, chief operating officer of TIME, about agent ads: brand-verified facts, labeled as sponsored, placed on the machine-readable vers...

On this episode of The Media Copilot , Pete Pachal sits down with Onix co-founders David Bennahum and Nicholas Nadeau to explore a very different model for AI: one where experts own specialized AI systems built around their knowledge, voice, judgment and point of view. They discuss why smaller, domain-specific models may sometimes outperform general-purpose AI, how Onix incorporates knowledge that...

As AI reshapes the internet, the future of journalism may depend on how publishers license, distribute, and protect their content. On this episode of The Media Copilot , host Pete Pachal sits down with Michael Ellis , President of Newstex, to explore one of the most important and least understood battlegrounds in artificial intelligence: content licensing. As AI companies race to build smarter mod...

What if the future of AI in media isn't replacing storytellers, but giving them better tools to tell better stories? This episode is sponsored by Descript.com   In this episode of The Media Copilot , host Pete Pachal sits down with Laura Burkhauser , CEO of Descript, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping media production without sacrificing creativity, editorial judgment, or human st...

Bots now make up about half of all web traffic. Are they a threat to block or an audience to win?  For most of the web's history, the deal was simple. Search engines pointed people to websites, and those visits paid for the content through advertising and subscriptions. AI is rewriting that arrangement, and the clearest place to see it is in who, or what, is showing up at the door. Akamai says it...

Local journalism has spent the last two decades fighting for survival. First came the internet. Then Craigslist. Then Google and social media. Advertising disappeared, newsrooms shrank, and communities across the country became news deserts. Now comes AI. For many journalists and publishers, artificial intelligence feels like the next existential threat...a technology capable of flooding the inter...

As AI transforms the way news is created and consumed, The Wall Street Journal is reimagining storytelling around trust, personalization, and audience experience. This episode is sponsored by: Adobe Acrobat This week on The Media Copilot , Pete Pachal sits down with Taneth Evans , Head of Digital at The Wall Street Journal , to explore how one of the world's leading news organizations is navigatin...

This episode is sponsored by: Adobe Acrobat This week on The Media Copilot , Pete Pachal sits down with veteran AI journalist and former Fortune reporter Sharon Goldman to discuss the growing disconnect between AI's promise and public perception. As Sharon launches her new Substack, Ground Level AI , she shares why she's shifting her focus away from model releases and Silicon Valley headlines to e...

As AI transforms how people discover information, the relationship between technology, media, and audience trust is evolving rapidly. This episode is sponsored by: Adobe Acrobat What happens when technology companies stop advertising in media and start owning it? In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal speaks with Jonathan Hunt , VP of Media & Content at HubSpot and Head...

How veteran editor Rick Hirsch sees AI helping journalists do more with less, while protecting the trust that investigative reporting depends on. This episode is sponsored by: Adobe Acrobat What happens when artificial intelligence meets one of journalism's most important missions: holding power accountable? In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal speaks with Rick Hirsch , d...

As AI systems increasingly rely on publisher content to answer questions, a new marketplace for information has quietly emerged. The problem? Publishers are barely part of it. This episode is sponsored by: Adobe Acrobat On this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal sits down with Jonathan Woahn to zero in on a part of the AI content ecosystem that’s just out of sight. The conversa...

Local journalism is collapsing under old business models. The next version may be more dependent on AI than most newsrooms are ready to admit. By The Copilot 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 experim...

In a world of fewer clicks and higher stakes, B2B media is being rebuilt around outcomes, not impressions. 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. A...

Why the future of generative media may hinge on who owns the data and who gets paid for it. 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...

As AI reshapes journalism and media, Richard Murphy of the Alliance for Audited Media explains why the industry needs actual standards. 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...

AI is reshaping how people search, shop, and consume information and that shift is starting to challenge the business models that have supported media for decades. 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 collaps...

Search is changing fast, and AI is at the center of it. 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 co...

AI is rapidly becoming part of how news is produced, distributed, and discovered. But what does that actually look like inside a newsroom? 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 exp...

What if instead of scrolling headlines, you had a personal intelligence agent that understood what matters to you and delivered only signal, not noise? 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....

Poynter’s Alex Mahadevan explains how newsrooms can use AI without losing the fundamentals of verification, context, and accountability. By The Copilot AI is already embedded in how people discover and consume news, from search to chat interfaces to automated summaries. So the question is no longer whether journalism will be shaped by AI. It’s how newsrooms maintain trust while experimenting respo...

Lawsuits set public rules; contracts set private ones. A media attorney on how leverage, timing, and context decide the path. 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...