Pioneering Payback
Recently, John Maher—the president of The Oregonian and OregonLive, one of the largest publishers in the state—noticed something different about Google search results. So he decided to run a test. He entered a reference to an article published by his newsroom: “Washington county sewer district Hawaii clean water services.” What came up was an AI-generated summary of the story, along with summaries of articles that quoted or highlighted its reporting. The results meant that no one would have a reason to click through. “It gets to the heart of what’s happening on a macro scale—how our content is being assimilated into AI summaries,” Maher told me. In April, he described his experiment to the state senate, as part of testimony in support of a bill called the Oregon Journalism Protection Act.
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