A. G. Sulzberger during his speech at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress. | Credit: WAN-IFRA v Reuters Institute
Dear Felipe,
According to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, news publishers have signed 146 deals with AI companies in the past three years. Over the same period, the Tow Center’s tracker only features 23 lawsuits, and some of those have been settled.
These figures make even more remarkable the speech delivered on Monday by New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger in Marseille. Sulzberger, whose company is suing OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, accused tech giants of «brazen theft,» stressed the risk they pose for the public sphere, and called on his colleagues to join forces against them. Scroll down to find three quotes from his speech and read it in full here.
In this newsletter you’ll also find a few examples of our own research and reporting on AI and the future of news, and an interview with safety expert Elena Cosentino on a record year for journalists’ killings around the world. Eduardo Suárez
Director of Editorial, Reuters Institute
Tuesday 2 June 2026
Our flagship newsletter
A. G. Sulzberger full speech
Read our own reporting on AI
On how publishers are joining forces. Our colleague Marina Adami recently published a long article on how news publishers are now joining forces to defend their journalism from tech companies. The piece looks at projects such as Spur, ProRata, RSL and this Danish alliance. | Read
On how AI might transform copyright. In early 2025 our colleague Gretel Kahn spoke to copyright experts Alina Trapova and Christian Mammen on how deals and lawsuits between news publishers and AI companies might reshape copyright law in the years to come. | Read
On how AI might transform the news. In March we published this essay by expert Shuwei Fang predicting four fundamental shifts in the news ecosytem and encouraging publishers to rethink their businesses accordingly, while letting go of familiar assumptions and holding on tightly to what really matters. | Read
| From our research Publishers don’t expect much from AI companies. For our report on media trends we asked hundreds of media managers how much money they expected to get from AI companies in three years’ time. Most of them were very sceptical: none expected AI licensing to be their main source of revenue and only 20% expected it to be a significant source of revenue in the years to come. Most of them either thought it would be a minor source of revenue (49%) or said they would not get any money at all (20%). |
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| Mourners attend the funeral of Al Jazeera journalist Mohammad Weshah, who was killed in an Israeli strike in April 2026. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa |
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New piece
When the killing of journalists disrupts nothing: a conversation with safety expert Elena Cosentino The issue. At least 168 journalists and media workers died while doing their jobs in 2025. Despite international legal protections, those responsible faced near-total impunity. Journalists were killed across conflicts and political crises from Sudan to Ukraine, Mexico, and Iran. Nowhere was that toll higher than in Palestine, where International News Safety Institute (INSI) recorded 68 journalist deaths in its yearly report Killing the Messenger 2025. What changed in 2025? Violence against journalists had been worsening for years, but the war in Gaza has been a watershed moment, said INSI’s Director Elena Cosentino during her conversation with our contributor Maurice Oniang’o. Cosentino pointed to the normalisation of journalist killings and suggested rapid advances to modern warfare, such as the rise of drones, are changing risks for journalists in conflict zones. |
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Do you want to catch up with the latest on the news industry? More than 35,000 people already receive our new daily roundup on LinkedIn, with readings, insights and resources curated by the Institute’s editorial team. | 
