In this issue: A.G. Sulzberger rallies the industry in Marseille. The UK gives publishers a way out of AI Overviews. The Spur coalition grows. Plus: two apps that put a small AI model on your Mac and guess your next word while you type.

What we’re talking about: It’s a big week for publishers pushing back against AI companies, and the action is in Europe.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger took the stage at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Marseille to rally the industry, calling AI companies’ use of journalism “brazen theft.” He noted the Times has already spent $20 million on its lawsuits, and that most news organizations simply can’t afford to follow suit.

Days later, the CMA, the UK competition watchdog, announced that publishers will be able to opt out of Google’s AI Overviews without opting out of Search entirely. A world’s first.

And the Spur coalition, started by BBC, FT, Guardian, Sky News, and The Telegraph to set shared licensing standards for AI use of journalism, announced 30 new members.

Litigation, regulation, coalition-building. But the industry is also adopting AI and to new realities. Ezra Eeman attended both the Nordic AI in Media Summit in Copenhagen and the Marseille congress. In his latest keynote, he urges publishers to understand the habits of people who build AI into their lives, think beyond the article, avoid commodity, master scarcity, and serve not only humans.

What else I’ve been reading:

AI & Journalism Links

Six provocations from Reuters Institute researcher Felix Simon: The low-hanging fruit of AI in journalism has been picked, human-in-the-loop is becoming a polite fiction, and “responsible AI” labels won’t fix the trust problem.

Three publisher coalitions have already committed to three incompatible models, and whichever one becomes the default makes the other two marginal. (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)

Forget social sharing buttons: Hacks/Hackers rebuilt its site for crawlers and agents. “Ask AI” buttons, an MCP server, and an llms.txt file. (Burt Herman, Hacks/Hackers)

There’s a Wired story on factchecking with AI. Don’t get me started. Ethan Mollick sums up the problems: “Running a few experiments with the free version of ChatGPT and citing work with old models, without access to web search, is not a good way to understand or communicate the nature of these systems and their flaws.”

The Economist built a ChatGPT app that lets users query its Trump approval rating tracker. Maybe younger audiences will discover The Economist inside ChatGPT rather than through Google. (Andrew Deck, Nieman Lab)

75 cards to help your newsroom figure out AI before someone makes a bad call: A free kit covering ethics, workflows, and use cases, developed with 15 journalists and trainers across multiple countries. (DW Akademie and MethodKit)

And now: Four quotes from A.G. Sulzberger‘s speech in Marseille.

  1. “Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work.”
  2. “Put simply, original reporting is very often how you know what you know. A.I. products, of course, cannot do this type of original reporting. They mine the public record but struggle to add to it.”
  3. “(…) A.I. products are likely not just to supplement but replace direct relationships with news organizations for many people. Surveys suggest this shift is happening far faster than most people imagine.”
  4. “Even if things are feeling fine now, remember that these early swells herald an approaching tsunami.”

Hands on: Local AI autocomplete for writers. While you type, the computer guesses your next word. Press tab to accept it. The more you use it, the better it gets. By computer, I mean a small AI model running entirely on your machine. Private, fast, and free of API costs.

Typing with the help of Cotypist and Gemma 4

This can feel like actual magic. I’ve been chasing something like this since I first saw autocomplete in code editors. I even tried using Cursor for prose, pulled my own context via MCP… and ran out of tokens. There are better options now for Mac users:

Cotypist looks polished and costs $8/month or $72/year.

Cotabby is the free, open-source alternative.

Both apps suggest a local LLM or let you choose: a small Qwen 3, Apple’s built-in model, or a beefier Gemma 4 for sharper suggestions, if your Mac has enough RAM to run it. You can also bring your own model. And you can steer the suggestions by adding custom instructions and tell the apps how many words they should suggest, from 2-4 to 10 and more.

Both apps are a bit hacky in how they locate the cursor on your screen and overlay suggestions. With some apps, this can break the layout. I’ve seen at least two more recent entries to this new category of auto-complete apps, and there will certainly be more. Until Apple builds something like this right into the OS.

One more thing: A very both-sides post from Daniel Jalkut on Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon:

This is THEFUTURE.