Richard Gingras has been surfacing in my human “feed” far too often these past few weeks.
As many readers will know, Gingras spent nearly two decades as Google’s head of news and still appears to hold an internal quasi-advisory role. Gingras now also serves as Chair of Village Media, a company Google routinely holds up as its model “publisher success story” before parliaments and regulators.
Just last week, I happened to see Gingras across the room at the International Center For Journalists (ICFJ) annual awards dinner. Not insignificantly, Google, and Gingras personally, have generously supported them with tens of thousands of dollars. So I was grateful to see him there; journalism certainly appreciates the financial support.
Later that same night, I listened to a new episode of the Future Media podcast, in which Gingras shared his assessment that serious news has “no value to consumers,” and that “the economic value of a news query” is so negligible that, if rounded, “would be zero.” It was jarring to say the least.
Few people have had more influence over the digital distribution of news and premium content than Richard Gingras. Yet here he was, Google’s longtime news advisor, perpetuating the false narrative that serious journalism has almost no value simply because Google’s preferred metric – its pay-per-click search text advertising monopoly – generates the least revenue from a news query.
An actual journalist holds big tech accountable
Two weeks ago, a different sort of Gingras interview appeared. In the Coda Story, fearless, independent interviewer, Natalia Antelava did something that almost no journalist does when facing a senior big tech executive: she directly challenged him on his role in helping create the mess.
She also pressed him as he repeatedly slipped into a collective “we” when describing Google’s relationship to the news business. The subtext was unmistakable: Google sees itself as the arbiter of news value, even as its public talking points and industry actions deny that value even exists.
Rewriting failure as generosity
When she asked Gingras what he considered his biggest mistake in his nearly two decades with Google, his answer was telling: “I would say the biggest mistake, honestly, was in our work with the industry, the Google News Initiative. We spent over a billion dollars over eight years, a billion and a half dollars trying to drive innovation.”
This is where I am obliged to note Google’s revenues over the last 10 years approximate to $2 TRILLION. So Gingras, Google’s chief evangelist to the news industry, would like us to know his biggest mistake in his 18 years at Google was sharing less than one tenth of one percentage of Google’s revenues with the news industry.
It’s astonishing how casually he rewrites failure as generosity.
The real “mistake” wasn’t spending too much on the Google News Initiative; it was believing that sprinkling what equates to less than 0.1% of Google’s revenues at the industry could offset the damage Google inflicted on the economics of media. Google’s chief evangelist for their news efforts believes serious news has no economic value and his biggest mistake was sharing a pittance of their revenues with the very companies it used to help maintain its adjudicated illegal monopolies in search, ad exchanges and publisher ad servers.
Yet, in their spare time, these same publishers provide one of the few remaining checks on power: scrutinizing leaders, governments, institutions, and abusive companies. But in Google’s calculus, “economic value” is whatever its ad system can monetize, and the civic value of news simply doesn’t register.
But here’s the irony: AI companies are now proving, more clearly than ever, that news and premium content are among the most valuable resources in the world. Not just culturally. Not just civically. Economically.
AI exposes what Google denies about news
Across the AI ecosystem, the most advanced large language models were trained disproportionately on the very materials Silicon Valley once dismissed as “legacy media”: reported information, fact-checked analysis, archives, scientific journals, books, documentaries, and professionally produced entertainment content. Their capabilities come from absorbing narrative, structure, relevance, serendipity, ground truth and cultural cornerstones created by expert journalists, television and film professionals.
This professionally crafted work is not interchangeable with memes, scraped Wikipedia summaries, or social media and user posts.
The value of news, entertainment and vetted information
Laundering professional content through Reddit or Common Crawl (the profile of which is a must-read in The Atlantic) doesn’t strip its economic value; it merely reveals that protections have not yet been duly enforced. High-quality training data is scarce, slow to produce, and expensive. It requires human expertise, legal standards, editorial judgment, and public trust in the sources, whether individuals or the brands that employ them. These are the exact qualities that distinguish premium publishers.
And this isn’t theory.
The law is catching up
A growing list of court cases and disclosures shows the same reality: AI companies rely on publishers’ journalism while avoiding paying for it. In Thomson Reuters v. Ross, a federal court confirmed that training AI requires licensing copyrighted content, recognizing a real market for high-quality data. In the Kadrey v. Meta case, unsealed documents showed Meta employees downloading pirated books and skirting licensing. And in U.S. v. Google, we learned that Meta pays Google for an API into its daily scraping to ground its own AI.
Yes, that means that Meta is apparently paying Google for access to publishers’ work.
Penske Media’s recent lawsuit argues that Google’s AI Overviews scrape and replace news directly in search results; a practice publishers cannot realistically opt out of because Google controls search through an illegal monopoly. When Google ingests news, sports and entertainment and places AI summaries above it, that is not “zero value.” It is extracted value.
Extracted value is an extinction level event
If we find ourselves in a world where AI replaces the need to click through to trusted journalism and premium content by using that same content to train its responses without compensation, the entire economic infrastructure – advertising, subscriptions, licensing – collapses. You cannot build sustainable media when distribution intermediaries extract the full economic value upstream.
DCN’s position is clear: premium content is the most valuable resource on the open web. Not only because of the cost of creating it, but because of the trust signals behind it. It is the core asset that fuels AI’s predictive capabilities and factual grounding on the most recent events. And publishers cannot and should not continue to allow it to be scraped, ingested, repurposed, and monetized without specific and freely given consent – not the kind coerced by a company already found to hold an illegal monopoly.
The future of AI relies on premium content
The future of AI should and will not be defined by who has the best model or the cheapest compute. It will hinge upon access to the highest-quality data, and whether that data is lawful, licensed, accurate, original, and kept current.
Publishers sit on the motherlode. This should be their moment. Unlike synthetic content and scraped user forums, premium content has enduring value because humans create it with standards.
This is why DCN has warned policymakers and the copyright office that improperly scraped training data threatens the economic foundation of news and entertainment. That’s why licensing must be the rule, not the exception.
The industry must align around three principles:
- No free training. High-quality content cannot be scraped without permission for search, training, or grounding.
- AI cannot substitute for news without fair value. AI Overviews and similar features must not cannibalize traffic using the very journalism they ingest.
- Licensing markets must continue to be built. Early negotiating will set the pricing floor; platforms that acknowledge fair value should be the greatest allies.
Gingras may claim that news has no value. But Silicon Valley’s behavior proves the opposite. In the AI era, premium content isn’t just valuable; it’s the most valuable input in the entire system.
Publishers must stop giving it away.
