The Media Copilot

AI is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape, but who ensures that publishers get fairly compensated for their content? As AI companies build massive language models, they often rely on vast amounts of content—much of it scraped from publishers without proper attribution or payment. This week on The Media Copilot, I sat down with Annelies Jansen, Chief Business Officer of ProRata AI, a compan...

AI is changing the way people tell stories — both PR professionals and journalists. Is it possible both might lose the most important part: authenticity? The media and communications industry is undergoing a seismic shift, and AI is at the center of it. From content creation to media relations, artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how PR professionals, journalists, and storytellers op...

AI is transforming the newsroom, redefining how journalists gather and analyze information, and pushing the boundaries of efficiency and storytelling. This week on The Media Copilot , I’m joined by Francesco Marconi—AI pioneer, former Associated Press executive, and founder of AppliedXL, a company revolutionizing how we extract actionable insights from real-time data. Francesco’s career spans over...

AI is redefining how PR professionals and journalists collaborate, bringing new efficiencies while challenging the balance of authenticity and connection. This week on The Media Copilot, I’m joined by Michelle Songy—founder and CEO of Press Hook, serial entrepreneur, and one of the most innovative minds at the intersection of AI and media. From her start in finance in London to founding a fintech...

AI tools are becoming essential partners for writers and creators, opening new possibilities for research, storytelling, and bringing ideas to life. This week on The Media Copilot , I’m joined by Alexandra Samuel — author, data journalist, keynote speaker, and one of the most forward-thinking voices on the intersection of creativity and AI. Alexandra doesn’t just use AI as a tool; she’s embraced i...

From custom news summaries to uncovering biases, AI can do a lot more than follow trends. This week, I’m excited to talk to Robert Caulk, Founder of Emergent Methods and the creator of AskNews . Rob has spent years exploring the intersection of AI, machine learning, and media, and his latest project brings a fresh perspective on how we consume news. AskNews isn’t just another chatbot—it’s a tool d...

How Clare Spencer is leveraging AI to redefine journalism, revolutionize content creation, and address the ethical complexities of modern media. In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal sits down with Clare Spencer, a journalist and producer whose innovative work with AI is reshaping the future of media. At the BBC, Clare was part of a pioneering team experimenting with GPT-3, exploring i...

The Race to Monetize AI's Content Appetite and Build the Bridge Between Publishers and AI This episode is sponsored by Adobe Stock . I'm excited to share this week's episode of The Media Copilot, where I had a fascinating conversation with Dan Goikhman, the innovative force behind Dappier. As we dive into the evolving landscape of AI and publishing, we tackle one of the most pressing questions fac...

Can AI Avatars Build Trust in the Newsroom? This episode is sponsored by Adobe Stock . This week on The Media Copilot , I’m thrilled to welcome Adam Mosam to the show. Adam is the founder of Channel 1, the groundbreaking news platform where AI avatars serve as anchors, delivering real news that’s entirely scripted, produced, and distributed by AI. Since Channel 1’s teaser video went mega-viral in...

 The Media Copilot is partnering with The Upgrade for a comprehensive six-week AI course tailored for PR and media professionals. Explore the course here. As you may know, in addition to hosting a podcast, I also teach media professionals — newsrooms, PR firms, and more — on how to apply AI to their work. I've taken all kinds of AI courses and constantly try out new tools, and I've distilled all t...

Business Insider's CEO on the Legal Challenges Reshaping the Media Industry This week, I’m thrilled to welcome Jakob Wais to the podcast. Jakob is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider Germany , a key player within Axel Springer’s media empire. Axel Springer was one of the first major media companies to embrace generative AI, striking a groundbreaking deal with OpenAI in late 2023, which...

This week I'm thrilled to welcome Liam Andrew to the podcast. Liam's been working with machine learning and AI for a lot longer than most of us. He worked on the product team at the Texas Tribune for more than eight years before making the jump earlier this year to the American Journalism Project , where he serves as Technology Lead for its Product & AI Studio, which obviously has a huge focus...

If you follow AI at all, you’ve probably heard of Google NotebookLM . The Gemini-powered feature got a huge popularity boost recently when it introduced the ability to create a totally synthetic podcast around any material you gave it. The idea of a “podcast this” button on any article, video, or set of PowerPoints is a powerful one, and it underscores the transformative power of AI and large lang...

When should we use AI and when shouldn't we? That's a question that comes up often when I consult with media companies and PR firms on integrating AI into their editorial teams. You have to balance a number of factors — chief among them goals, ethics, and cost. You also need to consider the long-term picture and what it looks like when AI begins to take on tasks that were previously human-driven....

This week on The Media Copilot podcast, I'm thrilled to talk to Joanna Stern , Senior Personal Technology Columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Joanna and I used to see each other quite often at various tech events when I was the Tech Editor at Mashable. She's known for her clever tech videos and deep reporting on how the titans of Silicon Valley are altering our lives in big and small ways. Latel...

Remember that AI song based on the voices of Drake and the Weeknd that made the rounds last fall ? It was a polarizing moment for AI — underscoring its power but also its peril, since neither artist had a say in the creation of that song. Enter Hooky . The fresh AI startup is trying to solve this problem, one that isn’t unique to music. It’s actually one of the biggest issues in generative AI, und...

I always feel good when I see fellow journalists going out on their own to build something new, and that's exactly what Nick Toso and Catalina Villegas are doing with Rolli . Toso is the former Washington Bureau Chief at CNN, and Villegas has worked as a producer and anchor for TV news. And with Rolli, they're creating a set of tools for journalists to help them work faster while producing better...

When it comes to the right and wrong of using AI in creative work, it's safe to say we're still figuring it out. That goes double for music, where AI has cultivated more than its share of lawsuits and suspicion from artists. From the audience perspective, AI is arguably changing things even more. Recommendation algorithms have the power to influence our tastes, but they also can put us in bubbles....

For companies building new things and trying to tell their story, there's a lot of talk about "going direct" lately. This is shorthand for a new(-ish) type of PR, where the founder and sometimes other key people simply use social platforms, newsletters and all the other tools of media themselves — eschewing the traditional route of telling their stories through journalists. The idea has gained tra...

Perplexity is here to answer your questions. Answering questions requires good information, though, and providing answers is easier if the people with the information actually want to give it to you. That’s a super-simple way of describing why Perplexity — the “answer engine” AI startup that pairs generative summaries with search — this week launched the Perplexity Publishers’ Program . By sharing...

AI companies hoovered up the entire internet before anyone questioned: Is that OK? This is the question that has led to a multitude of lawsuits (including, famously, The New York Times suing OpenAI ), many deals between AI companies and various publishers, and an emerging consensus that content creators should be compensated for their data. That's all well and good in theory, but what about the "h...

When you think about AI disrupting Hollywood, you typically think about CGI characters and creation tools like Sora and Pika that turn text prompts into impressively realistic visuals in seconds. But while technologies that create the things that meet our eyes understandably grab most of the headlines, there’s a quieter disruption happening at the very beginning of the moviemaking process. Dilip R...

When it comes to AI changing video, generative tools like Sora and Dream Machine have stolen a lot of the spotlight. with their ability to "imagine" video clips from text prompts. As cool as they are, most of them aren't available yet, and there's a big question of whether they actually save you any time. But while these magic clip generators create a lot of excitement, there's a quiet disruption...

Quick question: How do you know it’s really me in this podcast video? After all, with AI services like Synthesia and ElevenLabs ready to clone my likeness and voice in mere minutes, it’s more than a possibility these days. Besides obvious artifacts you might see in an AI-generated video, there’s the concept of content provenance , which in practice means a set of technical standards that imagery m...

Journalists are naturally skeptical people. They look critically at new things, especially when the incentives around them are complex, and that's certainly the case with AI. Given the early missteps of some sites publishing AI content and the existential threat the technology poses to distribution, it's only natural that a stigma around using AI has emerged among many reporters. That stigma is so...