Press Gazette

1 week ago | pressgazette.co.uk | Charlotte Tobitt

The urgent need for publishers to adopt innovative solutions to combat widespread AI content misuse was highlighted at a joint FIPP x PPA webinar on Wednesday. Exclusive research by Miso.ai, which creates personalised AI search engines for websites, revealed some stark insights into the extent to which publisher content is being used without consent or permissions/licences. The research inspected just over 2,700 publisher sites that had Robots.txt “Disallow” commands enabled against AI scrapers.

1 week ago | pressgazette.co.uk | Charlotte Tobitt

Facebook traffic appears to be a growing part of the social pie again at three-quarters of the world’s biggest news websites. The pattern can also be seen in the US, where the Facebook share of total social referral traffic was up at 74% of the biggest sites in March compared to one year earlier. New Similarweb data shared with Press Gazette appears to confirm the trend noted by multiple major publishers so far this year that Facebook traffic is on the up following a drastic downturn.

1 week ago | pressgazette.co.uk | Charlotte Tobitt

Cision is closing its journalism jobs service and has sold its expert enquiry service which it rebranded and then shut down last year. The media intelligence and communications solutions company said it is concentrating “resources and innovation efforts on its core technology platform strategy” in a press release about the sale of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to US-based Featured.com. Cision’s journalism and PR jobs service has long been one of the biggest recruitment boards in the industry.

1 week ago | pressgazette.co.uk | Charlotte Tobitt

Global advertising spend against news content is forecast to have fallen by a third in six years. Marketing research centre WARC estimates that ad spend with newsbrands will be $32.3bn this year, down 33.1% compared to 2019. Magazine brands have it even harder: ad spend with them is forecast to be $3.7bn in 2025, down 38.6% in the same time frame. WARC noted that brands continue to have concerns about advertising next to hard news, despite research debunking this as a problem for consumers.

1 week ago | pressgazette.co.uk | Bron Maher

An academic has warned that the UK is at risk of evolving “into a propaganda regime” following interviews with dozens of journalists about the state of Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. Jingrong Tong, a senior lecturer in Media and Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, said decreased compliance with FOI rules had resulted in “growing government secrecy”. Tong interviewed 31 journalists from around the UK for the study, which was published in the academic journal Journalism Practice.