The Media Copilot

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...

A tech-forward journalism professor unpacks how AI is changing how he teaches reporting and what it means for the entry-level jobs that are increasingly endangered.  AI is not just changing how journalism gets made. It is changing how journalism gets taught. In this episode of The Media Copilot , host Pete Pachal sits down with Kris Hodgson-Bright , professor of digital communications and media at...

A candid look at how aggregation, personalization, and trust shape news discovery in an AI-driven internet. 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 Th...

As the year wraps up, we’re taking a pause from weekly interviews to share a curated Best of the Year in AI. 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 worki...

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The surprising places AI helps journalists, and the places it really doesn’t. 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 const...

The Taboola CEO explains how USA Today’s DeeperDive changes news discovery, and why publishers might need “chat” after all. 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...

In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal talks with Mark Howard , Chief Operating Officer at Time , about how a century-old newsroom is adapting to a world where readers increasingly turn to AI systems for information. 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 partne...

Michael Rubenstein on how “brand agents” are reshaping advertising, publishing, and the Internet itself 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 audie...

Inside how AI is actually being used inside media companies today— and what success looks like when it’s done right. 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 wor...