The digital news organization Axios is teaming up with OpenAI to provide local news coverage to small markets for free.
In the deal concocted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei, OpenAI will reportedly fund the startup of 13 newsletters destined for smaller, local markets. In turn, Axios' journalism will be used to train OpenAI in the art of local news with an eye on a cost-effective source of news for smaller communities.
The term is three years.
Dan Scnheider, vice president for free speech at the Media Research Center (MRC), says this partnership comes as the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has made the advertising that kept local newspapers, radio and television stations afloat all but disappear.
"Local news is dying," he tells AFN. "More and more, these small publishers are having to … fire staff and run AP stories, and AP has turned this hardcore radical left corner."
"In comes these giant tech companies that have more billions of dollars than they know what to do with, and these giant tech companies are now cutting deals with all kinds of media outlets" that Schneider says are "always on the Left."
That bias, he says, is a problem.
"You can't find a right-leaning outlet that's getting any of these deals, whether it's with an AI company or whether it's with Apple or something like that," the MRC spokesman observes. "It's always the tech companies funding the Left."
He says the partnership is just another way the Left is taking control of the fourth estate.
"This is the engine to promote left-wing ideology through the media," Schneider summarizes. "This is what it appears to be to me."
Other media critics and watchdogs argue that blending tech-giant funding with newsroom automation poses conflicts of interest and threatens traditional reporting standards.
Meanwhile, industry advocates note that targeted, one-off deals between major AI corporations and select publishers do not solve the broader, structural funding crisis facing local journalism nationwide.
