Source: Jodi Kantor (Pulitzer Prize-winning NYT investigative reporter) via LinkedIn, sharing a June 1, 2026 essay by A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of The New York Times
Original essay: A.I., Journalism and the Uncertain Future of the Public Square — delivered at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress
The Signal
On June 1, 2026, New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger delivered what may be the most consequential public statement on AI and journalism since the Times filed its landmark copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023. Speaking at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress — the largest annual gathering of news publishers globally — Sulzberger called AI companies’ use of journalistic content “a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale” and urged the world’s news organizations to stop being “too quiet, too passive and too fragmented” in response.
Jodi Kantor, the Times investigative reporter whose work helped expose Harvey Weinstein and whose byline carries significant institutional weight, amplified the essay on LinkedIn with a personal endorsement: “His essays on press freedom, journalism’s role in democracy, and journalistic independence are always worth reading. But this one, on AI, strikes me as the most powerful yet.”
Sulzberger’s Core Argument
The essay is structured around a single thesis: AI companies are committing a “tragedy of the civic commons” by strip-mining journalism without consent or compensation, and the news industry has been too passive in its response.
His argument proceeds in four movements:
1. The original sin of AI training data. Sulzberger frames AI companies’ use of copyrighted content not as a legal gray area but as settled theft. He identifies four inputs to AI — talent, compute, energy, and data — and notes that the first three are paid for without question. Only “data” (his term for copyrighted creative and journalistic work) is taken without consent. He systematically dismantles each industry justification: fair use doesn’t permit substitutive copying at scale; national security arguments are a deflection; the cost of licensing deals is trivial compared to data center construction.
2. The substitution problem. The essay’s sharpest analytical point is that AI products don’t merely use journalism as training data — they actively substitute for it. AI chatbots answer questions that users would previously have answered by visiting a news site, destroying the audience and revenue relationships that fund original reporting. This is not incidental to the AI business model; it is the business model.
3. The democratic stakes. Sulzberger elevates the argument beyond industry self-interest. He frames original journalism — “going to places, talking to people, digging up information, covering important issues and events, providing context and analysis, investigating the powerful” — as infrastructure for democratic accountability. The destruction of journalism’s economic model is therefore not a media industry problem but a civic one.
4. The call to action. The essay closes with a direct appeal to the 60+ countries represented at WAN-IFRA: stop being passive. Assert rights. Litigate. License on fair terms. The Times, he notes, is already doing this — the OpenAI/Microsoft lawsuit is the most prominent example, but the Times has also struck licensing deals with several AI companies on terms it considers acceptable.
Context and Stakes
The essay arrives at a moment of maximum tension between the news industry and AI companies:
- The NYT v. OpenAI/Microsoft lawsuit, filed December 2023, is proceeding through discovery. It is the highest-profile copyright case in the AI era and its outcome will set precedent for the entire creative industry.
- OpenAI’s SearchGPT and Google’s AI Overviews have demonstrably reduced click-through traffic to news sites, with publishers reporting 20–40% declines in referral traffic from Google in categories where AI summaries now appear.
- The WAN-IFRA audience represents publishers from over 60 countries, many of whom lack the legal resources to litigate individually. Sulzberger’s appeal is explicitly to collective action — a coalition of publishers asserting rights together.
- The economic backdrop is severe: U.S. newsroom employment has fallen by more than 60% since 2008. The Times is one of the few large news organizations that has successfully navigated the digital transition; Sulzberger’s authority on this question derives partly from that survival.
What Sulzberger Is Not Saying
The essay is careful to distinguish between opposing AI and opposing AI abuse. Sulzberger explicitly states the Times uses AI internally — “responsibly, ethically, and with humans making the decisions” — and has struck licensing deals with AI companies it considers fair. He is not a Luddite. He is making a property rights argument: use our work, but pay for it.
This distinction matters for how the essay will be received. It is harder to dismiss as incumbent defensiveness when the speaker is simultaneously deploying the technology in question.
Implications for the Information Environment
For practitioners and analysts focused on the information environment, this essay signals several dynamics worth tracking:
The legitimacy war is escalating. AI companies have largely won the public narrative on innovation and progress. Sulzberger’s speech — delivered to a global audience of publishers, not a domestic American one — is an attempt to reframe the debate around property rights and democratic accountability rather than technological optimism.
The licensing market is forming under duress. The combination of litigation (NYT, Getty Images, authors’ guilds) and legislative pressure (EU AI Act, proposed U.S. legislation) is forcing AI companies to negotiate. The terms of those deals — and which publishers accept them — will shape the information ecosystem for a generation.
Smaller publishers are the real vulnerability. The Times can litigate. Most publishers cannot. If the large platforms establish a norm of paying the Times but not smaller outlets, the consolidation of the information environment accelerates. Sulzberger’s appeal to WAN-IFRA is implicitly about preventing that outcome.
The public square argument has strategic value. Framing journalism as democratic infrastructure rather than commercial content elevates the policy stakes and invites regulatory intervention. Watch for this framing to appear in congressional testimony and regulatory filings in the coming months.
Signal sourced from Jodi Kantor via LinkedIn (June 2, 2026), referencing A.G. Sulzberger’s remarks at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, June 1, 2026. Full essay at nytco.com.