The Media Copilot

What if AI could make us better writers instead of replacing us? The next chapter of the internet may do exactly that by using technology to strengthen creativity rather than erase it. 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...

What if AI could read your book, learn from it, summarize it, and remix it, all with your permission and a paycheck? Trip Adler is working to make that possible. Trip Adler co-founded Scribd , helped pioneer book subscriptions, and knows publishing inside and out. Now he’s back with a new mission: protect human creativity in the age of AI. In this episode of The Media Copilot , Pete Pachal talks w...

As AI eats the internet, publishers are fighting to keep control. Raptive’s Chief Growth Officer, Marc McCollum, says it’s not the end of the open web, it’s a chance to rebuild it on creators’ terms. 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 cre...

 Local news without politics, crime, or chaos? Meet the startup making it happen. 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+ loca...

Social feeds turned news into a rage machine. Cory Ondrejka says it’s time for a reset! Use AI to cut the noise, respect your time, and deliver journalism that actually matters. 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 i...

 AI engines are siphoning off billions in value from publishers.  Bill Gross says it’s time to flip the model: charge for crawls, share revenue on answers, and build the “conversation layer” that keeps audiences engaged. 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 shifte...

If the last decade was about platforms swallowing the press, the next one is about AI mediating everything…how we find news, what we trust, and who gets paid.  On this episode of The Media Copilot , host Pete Pacha l 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 Econ...

  Publishers don’t need bigger walls—they need dials. Here’s how to see, price, and shape LLM and agent activity instead of getting steamrolled by it. 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...

From “subscriber‐financed stalwart” to AI trailblazer—how The Atlantic built an AI task force, overhauled its search strategy, and struck bold licensing deals to future-proof quality journalism . 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...

Cloudflare’s move to block AI bots by default could reshape how content is protected online—raising new questions about copyright, scraping, and the future of AI training data. 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: an...

From “news wholesaler” to AI innovator—how the Associated Press is adapting to new audience habits, synthetic content, and search-native journalism. 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 h...

Inside Particle’s mission to fix the way we consume headlines—with AI summaries, source transparency, and more. 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...

Hugging Face’s media liaison talks trust, tech, and why the next great newsroom might look more like a dev team. 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 de...

There's something in TollBit's latest State of the Bots report that really jumped out at me. The major AI companies—notably Meta, OpenAI, and Google—have essentially given themselves permission to ignore robots.txt for their user agents. In the big picture of AI scraping it might seem like a detail, but it feels to me like a turning point from liberally interpreting the mechanisms for protecting c...

What does it take to get AI to notice your content? Scrunch AI’s Chris Andrew shares the secret sauce. 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...

AI risk and the tenacity required. 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 audien...

When chatbots summarize your reporting instead of sending audiences to your website, who really wins—and how can creators fight back? 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 direc...

Jane Barrett, Head of AI Strategy at Reuters, joins The Media Copilot to share how one of the world’s largest news agencies is actively shaping the future of AI in journalism—without crossing the line on trust. 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...

Jonathan Roberts of Dotdash Meredith unpacks how one of the largest digital publishers is adapting to AI and the changing nature of online audiences. 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...

A revealing conversation with NewsGuard’s Steven Brill on trust, truth, and the battle for clean data in the AI age.  The AI era is rewriting the rules of media — but what happens when disinformation sneaks into the algorithms shaping what we see and believe? 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 w...

By using AI, hyperlocal news platform Patch expanded from 1,100 to over 30,000 communities in a matter of months. How they did it without creating slop. This week on The Media Copilot , I sat down with Warren St. John , CEO of Patch , to explore how AI is driving this exponential growth. Patch’s AI-powered newsletters can now spin up hyperlocal updates for virtually any ZIP code in the U.S., offer...

We're slashing the price of our AI course for PR and media professionals for one day only. The results from the first cohort of AI for PR & Media Professionals are in. The six-week AI training course closed on Tuesday with two dozen students showing capstone projects that incorporated advanced AI techniques like automations and custom tooling, often pairing them with popular tools like Perplex...

When Dow Jones’ business intelligence service went down the path of AI, it was determined to avoid stepping on any copyright mines. This week on The Media Copilot , I sat down with Traci Mabrey, General Manager of Factiva, the business intelligence platform from Dow Jones. Unlike many AI companies that scrape publicly available data without permission, Factiva has secured licensing agreements with...

For decades, local journalism has been in decline—shrinking budgets, newsroom closures, and disappearing community coverage have left behind what experts call "news deserts." But could AI change that? Could it actually help rebuild local news, making it more accessible, efficient, and sustainable? This week on The Media Copilot , I sat down with Mark Riley , former Senior VP of Innovation at Dow J...

AI is rewriting the rules of media, but not all change is for the better. As AI slop floods the internet, the battle over quality, ethics, and authenticity has never been more urgent. This week on The Media Copilot , I sat down with Kate Knibbs, senior writer at Wired , to dissect the murky world of AI-powered content farms. Her investigative reporting on how SEO masterminds are snapping up legacy...