Needless to say, those platforms have been undermining the revenue streams of publishers including Nine, which owns this publication.

Eighteen months ago, publishers – thanks to the Australian government, which has been remarkable in its proactive response to the platform giants – made a deal that provided them with some compensation from Google and Meta, Facebook’s parent company. While Google is happy for this compensation deal to continue, Meta has become recalcitrant.

‘[What] we’re not doing is channelling my erudite, eloquent fellow Australians AC/DC: it wasn’t Dirty Deals Done Dirt Cheap.’

News Corp CEO Robert Thomson

And News Corp isn’t the first of the worldwide publishers to do a deal with the AI enemy – it’s just the largest.

Indeed, publishers seem to be lining up to speak with OpenAI, which is clearly on a mission to sign up as many of them as possible.

So here is what we know about the deal.

In the words of News Corp’s press release, “OpenAI will receive access to current and archived content from News Corp’s major news and information publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investor’s Business Daily, FN, and New York Post; The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun; The Australian, news.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail, The Advertiser, and Herald Sun; and others.”

That is about where the information train stops on this deal.

Thomson provided the Fox News audience with lots of flourishes, but little facts.

“We can’t go into specific details about the agreement, other than to say it’s quite profound in its consequences for journalism, and not only journalism now, but journalism in the future. And so we’re very proud to partner with Sam [Altman] and his team, and it’s just clear that they appreciate the preciousness of provenance,” Thomson said in the live interview.

Loading

Piecing together the bits of information that have been released officially (and those unofficially garnered from the story posted by the News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal), OpenAI has permission to display content from News Corp mastheads in response to user questions, and to enhance its products and search answers with display links to articles in News Corp publications.

(One can only assume that those using OpenAI will not have access to News Corp’s articles that sit behind a paywall. To do so would seriously undermine the publisher’s business model.)

From News Corp’s perspective, it can boast that the tie-up with OpenAI provides it with another distribution channel.

“There’s been this huge shift of value and power and leverage from creators to distributors, and clearly the AI age is another iteration of distribution,” Thomson said. “That’s why being a partner with Sam and his team is so important, that we get the balance right between creation and distribution, and what we’re distributing has the essence of provenance in it.”

It is exactly that shift in leverage that makes any deal done between even the largest of publishers and AI dangerously one-sided.

Despite this poor negotiating position, many publishers have lined up to take a bit of cash from OpenAI or its equivalents. To them, it’s better doing a deal with the devil than doing no deal.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.