The Media Copilot

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...

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...