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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Publishers urge CMA to curb Google's AI 'fine-tuning'
And Readly hit with deluge of user complaints after Cafeyn merger
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 22 April.
🤥 Thousands of journalists are losing their jobs in the US and UK with publishers directly blaming falling referral traffic from Google.
The latest example is magazine giant Bauer, which specifically pointed the finger at AI-written summaries stealing clicks from publishers as it announced major cutbacks on its publishing teams.
Yet Google has told the UK Competition and Markets Authority that there is “no realistic prospect of harm to publishers in respect of training/fine-tuning of AI models for search and search generative AI features”.
It’s like the giant anaconda that has just eaten a goat issuing assurances that its lunch will be absolutely fine.
In submissions to the CMA, publishers have voiced specific alarm over “fine-tuning” queries that crawl publisher websites to improve AI answers in real time without providing the citations and possible licensing/payment opportunities offered by RAG (retrieval augmented generation) answers.
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⛓️💥The merger of all-you-can-read apps Cafeyn and Readly offers the prospect of a step forward on the path to building a widely-used Spotify-style model for magazines (and some decent competition for Apple News+).
But the rollout of a new combined app has left many longstanding Readly users fuming.
They’ve lost use of puzzles through magazines, their personalisation data and in some cases access altogether. And some complain that there is no way to cancel or request a refund.
We found out what has gone wrong and what Readly has to say about it.
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🚀 And Press Gazette’s sponsor Q5 has produced a new guide explaining how publishers can attract and retain high value audiences.
Great journalism and content is obviously an essential part of the mix. But what about the product and commercial teams?
How do you make sure that everyone has enough autonomy to feel empowered while also rowing in the right direction to take the business where it needs to go?
Read the quick version of this here.
Or access their full white paper report here.
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