UNESCO consults on fair pay for news in the digital age

The United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO (or United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), has launched a global consultation on “fair compensation for news,” as online platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly rely on journalistic content.

The consultation, announced on June 19, is intended to inform draft guidance that UNESCO will issue to its 194 member states on how best to “protect the future of journalism and safeguard information integrity.”

The draft guidance builds on UNESCO’s Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms, issued in 2023, which called for supporting media sustainability, diversity, and pluralism. The draft is also informed by the agency’s work on human rights impact assessments, global principles promoting fair compensation for journalism, and generative AI governance.

On the latter, based on 2024 research from executives at Ziff Davis (NASDAQ: ZD), one of the largest publicly-traded digital media companies, leading AI companies such as OpenAI, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), and Meta (NASDAQ: META) rely more on content from “premium publishers”—established and legacy news and media agencies like the New York Times and Condé Nast—to train their large language models (LLMs) than they publicly admit.

For example, it found that for some LLMs, content from a set of 15 premium publishers accounted for a significant portion of the datasets used for training. When analyzing an open-source replication of the dataset used to train GPT-2, the research found that almost 10% of the URLs featured came from the set of 15 premium publishers it studied.

UNESCO’s newly launched consultation outlines how the use of journalistic content by AI, along with other disruptions to the media landscape—including decreased funding for public-interest journalism, the contraction or closure of local and community news organizations—could represent “a fundamental and ongoing change in the structure of the information economy.”

According to the UN agency, “A small number of large, multinational digital platforms and AI actors now occupy a central intermediary role between media and the public, shaping content discovery, influencing the conditions through which journalism reaches audiences, and mediating access to digital advertising markets in ways that have materially altered the economic conditions in which journalism operates.”

The consultation is seeking feedback from governments, regulatory authorities, media, civil society, academia, and other stakeholders, who have until July 30 to share their perspectives on how the draft guidance can be improved “to achieve the aim of safeguarding freedom of expression, strengthening media viability, and supporting the future of independent journalism in the context of growing digital platforms and AI actors.”

UNESCO said the final draft of the guidance will be published later this year, alongside a report summarizing the key insights and contributions received.

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