The Media Copilot

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 a growing divide in the AI ecosystem. On one side are models trained on vast, scraped datasets. On the other are systems built around...

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 is breaking down just as fast.

In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal talks with Richard Murphy, CEO of the Alliance for Audited Media, to unpack a growing industry...

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 collapse of traditional ad economics to the rising value of trust, this conversation breaks down how discovery is evolving, why some publishers may struggle to adapt, and where...

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 content.

In this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal speaks with Josh Blyskal, who leads answer engine optimization research at Profound, a...

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 experimenting with practical AI tools that support journalists in everyday workflows. These include tools for copy editing and proofreading, systems that suggest relevant datasets for charts...

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. It’s context.

Eva explains how her experience in political data analytics shaped her mission to make high quality understanding accessible to everyone, not just institutions with research teams. Gnom...

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 responsibly.

In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, Pete Pachal sits down with Alex Mahadevan, Director of MediaWise and a faculty member at Poynter, to unpack what media literacy looks like...

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 so far, how fair use really works in court, and why the future will be shaped less by courtroom theory and more by deal structures. The key parts of those deals that...

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 Lethbridge Polytechnic in Alberta, Canada, to unpack what happens when AI enters the newsroom and the classroom at the same time.

Kris has seen journalism education e...

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 The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal sits down with Kat Downs Mulder, GM of Yahoo News, to unpack how one of the largest digital media platforms in the world is re...

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 working at the center of AI, publishing, and platform design. And while the tools keep evolving, the same core questions ke...

AI has turned verification into a newsroom survival skill.

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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 constraints.

Darla comes from a background in data journalism and visual storytelling at places like the Washington Post and now leads product at a nonprofit newsroom that has been experimenting wi...

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 of audience discovery may look nothing like the search driven world we grew up in.

Adam has been building Taboola since...

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 partnering with AI companies, the work required to safeguard Time’s archive, and how the Time AI Agent grew out of experiments with summaries, translations, and audio briefings.

Th...

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 audiences interact.

In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Michael Rubenstein, Co CEO of Firsthand and one of the original architects of modern ad tech. After helping launch DoubleC...

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 works with major media companies to build internal AI environments that support reporting, fact-checking, content repurposing, sales operations, research, and product strategy. John has a rare view into...

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 are entering a writing renaissance where technology helps writers stay focused, authentic, and connected to their readers.

They explore:

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 with Trip about his latest venture, Created by Humans, a licensing platform that helps AI companies access creative works legally, starting with books. 

The...

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 creators and 200 enterprise publishers and Marc argues that the key to survival isn’t joining the platforms, it’s owning you...

 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+ local markets with a “Seed-to-Profit” model, how their anti-scraping strategy builds trust from the ground up, and why they just acquired controversial AI startup Good Daily—not for the...

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 it broke?

On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal talks with Cory Ondrejka, former Facebook and Google exec (and co...

 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 shifted from websites to AI engines without compensation. Bots now outnumber human visitors by staggering ratios, and publishers are footing the bill.

On this episode of The Med...

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 Pachal 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 Economist to NYC Media Lab to founding a policy newsroom, shapes a rare perspective; he speaks policy, product, and press. Who sets the rules for AI and m...

 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 Copilot, host Pete Pachal welcomes Aurélie Guerrieri, Chief Growth Officer at DataDome, a Forreste...

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’s leadership, The Atlantic has become a rare legacy‐media success story—profitable, subscriber-driven, and bold in its AI strategy. From launching an internal task force post-ChatGPT to pivoting away from Google-first traffic, to striking a li...

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: any new domain hosted on its massive network will automatically block AI bots from scraping content. That’s a major escalation in the growing fight over who gets to access a...

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 household name.

With AI search platforms like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google’s AI Overviews reshaping how people access news, media companies are being forced to rethink their entire approach. But the AP occupie...

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 to assemble a comprehensive summary of any given topic—highlighting key facts, surfacing original sources like tweets or trailers, and analyzing bias across coverage. It’s curation with context, and it’s changing how people inter...

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 developer world and the newsroom—makes him one of the most insightful voices on how AI is reshaping journalism from the inside out. Before joining Hugging Face, Flor...

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 content to brazenly flouting them.

I put this question directly to TollBit CEO Toshit Panigrahi when he joined me on this week’s Media Copilot podcast. A little background on TollBi...

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 helping content creators understand and optimize for "AI SEO," a new frontier that goes beyond traditional search algorithms.

Pete and Chris dive deep into the emerging concept of "SE...

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 audiences no longer need to visit publisher platforms to get information, how do publishers maintain visibility and revenue?

To explore this challenge, I sat down with David Buttle, founder o...

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 directing a person to a website.

That's the basic thing AI services do, but if you think about it, even if the user doesn't...

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 has led one of the most ambitious and thoughtful integrations of artificial intelligence in a major newsroom—balancing innovation with editorial ethics at every step...

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 week on The Media Copilot, I talk with Jonathan about how one of the biggest names in digital publishing is confronting—and capitalizing on—AI’s rapid rise.

Dotdas...

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 working to restore trust in news. Steven’s media legacy includes launching Court TV, creating American Lawyer magazine, and authoring bestsellers on health care, education, and muc...

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., offering a new model for personalized, community-driven journalism at scale. But what does this mean for the editorial process, and how does AI fit into a model that ha...

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 Perplexity and Claude. The AI-enhanced workflows they created are going to save them hours of tedious work every week.

And now we're about to do it all again.

On March 18...

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 all 5,000 of its content providers—a bold move in an industry still navigating copyright battles.

🔹 AI-powered summaries with real licensing: Factiva’s Smart Summaries uses AI to distill key insights from trus...