Media Trendlines — June 18, 2026
📰 Key Themes
- Publishers are moving their fight against AI scraping out of copyright court and onto the invoice, rewriting site terms to charge £500 per unauthorized scrape — while one consumer-tech site reports 1.6 million OpenAI scrapes in a single day against 300 referral clicks.
- An NBCUniversal executive defended Comcast’s seven-figure donation to President Trump’s White House ballroom as a cost of doing business, the same week a forthcoming book reported Jeff Bezos privately told Trump that The Washington Post was underperforming.
- The San Antonio Express-News turned a daily one-minute TikTok show into a durable local-trust play, reaching an audience its paywall never could.
- Informa reconfirmed full-year guidance even after rescheduling more than fifteen events around the war in Iran, a reminder that B2B events remain one of media’s steadiest businesses.
- Streaming bundles now drive 28% of new sign-ups, double their 2024 share, as organic subscriber growth runs dry.
Jump to: 🤖 The AI Scraping Fight · 📺 Big Media Moves · 💡 Business Model Innovation · 📎 Also Noted · 🧭 Takeaways
🤖 The AI Scraping Fight
Publishers Found a Cheaper Weapon Than Copyright Law: The Invoice
Source: 🎙️ The Future of Media, Explained (Press Gazette), featuring Chris Dicker of the Movement for an Open Web.
Litigation against AI companies has been slow, expensive, and uncertain. A growing group of publishers is trying a different route: rewrite the site’s terms and conditions to state that scraping costs £500, send an invoice when it happens, and — if the invoice goes unpaid — file it in county court as an ordinary unpaid debt. The Movement for an Open Web is handing publishers the terms for free. It turns a hard copyright argument into a simple breach-of-contract claim, and it works against any scraper with a UK entity to sue.
The numbers explain the urgency. Trusted Reviews, the consumer-tech site owned by Candor Media, says it was hit with 1.6 million scraping requests from OpenAI in a single day and got roughly 300 referrals back in return. Third-party scrapers — the show named Oxylabs, Bright Data, Exa and others — hit the site about 300,000 times a day. Trusted Reviews runs two product-testing labs and publishes 3,000-to-5,000-word reviews, and it has stopped investing in evergreen how-to content because AI answers now consume it before a reader ever clicks.
The shift matters because it reframes the problem. Copyright litigation asks a court to weigh fair use, a fight the largest AI companies are happy to fund for years. A contract claim asks only whether someone agreed to terms and then broke them, and at £500 a time it scales into what one advocate called “death by a thousand county court judgments.” It also exposes how lopsided the current arrangement is. The New York Times’ A.G. Sulzberger calls the unlicensed use “brazen theft,” Digital Content Next has sent a cease-and-desist to the Common Crawl Foundation, and the publishers being offered selective licensing deals are being picked off one at a time precisely because there is no collective price. A site that earns 300 visits for 1.6 million scrapes does not have a traffic problem. It has a business the open web’s biggest customers have decided they no longer need to pay for.
The WordPress angle: This entire strategy lives at the site layer, not the courtroom. The terms have to be published in a site’s conditions, the scraping has to be logged at the server, and any invoice has to be tied to verifiable request data — all of it owned by the CMS and the hosting stack, not the lawyers. Whoever makes that instrumentation a default rather than a plugin scavenger hunt hands small publishers the one thing they currently lack: the evidence to enforce.
📺 Big Media Moves
Media’s Owners Keep Treating Proximity to Power as an Operating Cost
Source: Status by Natalie Korach. ⚠️ Paywalled — summary based on the available preview.
Two items in the same Status edition describe the same posture from very different owners. At an NBC training day ahead of the Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, Anzio Williams, an EVP at NBCU Local, reportedly defended parent Comcast’s seven-figure donation to President Trump’s White House ballroom project as essentially a cost of doing business — the price, as he framed it, of being able to keep producing journalism. In the same newsletter, an excerpt from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s forthcoming book Regime Change reports that Jeff Bezos told Trump over a December 2024 dinner that The Washington Post was underperforming, months before he began dismantling large parts of it.
The detail behind the paywall matters less than the pattern in plain sight. The owners and executives of two of the country’s biggest news operations are, in their own words, treating accommodation of political power as a line item — a donation here, a candid disparagement of your own newsroom there. It lands the same week a widely covered study put trust in news at a record low. Audiences are never told these calculations are happening, but they can feel the result, and “we paid for the ballroom so we could keep reporting” is not the reassurance the people making it seem to think it is. The trust problem and the ownership problem are the same problem.
💡 Business Model Innovation
A One-Minute TikTok Show Is Doing What San Antonio’s Paywall Can’t
Source: A Media Operator by Christiana Sciaudone.
The San Antonio Express-News built a daily 60-second news show, “In a Minute,” for TikTok and Instagram, and grew it to 70,000 TikTok followers and 183,000 on Instagram without hiring outside TV talent. A rotating cast of in-house reporters produces each episode in under an hour, covering two hard-news items and one lighter feature, and cutting to images of the full print stories to point viewers back to the reported work.
The strategy is patience, not virality. Editors say they never expected a hit; they wanted brand recognition and trust with a younger audience that will not pay for a subscription today and might in a decade. That is a sharper read on the trust problem than any consolidation play. Trust is not restored by merging two national brands or buying scale — it is built one community at a time, by being the recognizable, useful source in someone’s feed. A local paper getting called somebody’s “Barbara Walters” in a bar is worth more than another record-low trust survey.
Informa Shrugs Off a War and Reminds Everyone B2B Events Still Pay
Source: A Media Operator by Bron Maher.
Informa reconfirmed full-year guidance after rescheduling more than fifteen events around the war in Iran, with its live-events division posting 7.6% underlying revenue growth in the first five months of the year. The company says it has booked or traded more than $4 billion in 2026 revenue and already has $0.6 billion confirmed for 2027, citing strength in healthcare, food, beauty and finance events and targeted investment in gaming.
While ad-supported digital media spends the year being sold off and consolidated, the B2B events business absorbs a regional war and barely flinches. The reason is structural: events sell access and intent, not attention, and that revenue is contracted months ahead and largely immune to an algorithm change or an AI summary. The least glamorous corner of media keeps proving to be its most defensible.
Streaming’s Growth Now Comes From Bundles, Not New Subscribers
Source: Axios Media Trends Executive. ⚠️ Paywalled — summary based on the available preview.
Bundles now account for 28% of all new streaming sign-ups, double their 2024 share, according to Axios, with Peacock leading on sixteen bundle partnerships. The same preview notes that weekly episode releases have overtaken binge drops as the dominant release model, a reversal that began in 2021 and has widened since.
Both shifts say the same thing: the streaming land grab is over and the optimization era has begun. When organic growth stalls at saturation, the lever becomes distribution deals and churn management rather than new originals. Weekly releases are cheaper to retain subscribers on and turn a show into appointment viewing; bundling borrows another company’s subscribers instead of buying your own. Neither is a growth story. Both are what an industry does once it stops growing.
📎 Also Noted
- 🔹 Rupert Murdoch rebuked coverage of the Iran war while President Trump separately complained about the press’s war reporting — two signs the conflict’s media politics are still being fought. (Status, ⚠️ Paywalled)
- 🔹 Australian radio group ARN climbed back above sports network SEN on the Unmade Index after settling its long-running dispute with Kyle Sandilands, whose new venture will share revenue with the company even as it competes for his old breakfast audience. (Mumbrella)
- 🔹 The NewsGuild is in an escalating fight with Reuters, the latest labor flashpoint at a major wire service. (Status, ⚠️ Paywalled)
- 🔹 Snap shares slid as reviewers panned its new Specs smart glasses; the Vergecast’s verdict was that they “look good on nobody.” (The Vergecast)
🧭 Takeaways
- The AI fight is moving from the courtroom to the contract. Publishers waiting for a landmark copyright ruling will lose evergreen traffic in the meantime; the ones acting now are rewriting their terms and logging every scrape so they can invoice for it.
- A 300-click return on 1.6 million scrapes is not a traffic problem — it is a broken deal. Any publisher still measuring AI’s impact in referral percentages is measuring the wrong thing.
- Scale cannot buy back trust; presence can. A 60-second local show that people recognize does more for credibility than any merger of national brands.
- The steadiest money in media is the least glamorous. Contracted B2B events shrugged off a war while ad-supported digital kept being sold for parts.
- When growth stops, the tells show up in the product. Bundles and weekly release schedules are optimization moves; they signal an industry managing decline, not chasing expansion.