News Corp just signed a $150 million, five-year deal letting Meta train its AI products on content from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and every other News Corp publication. This comes on top of the $250 million deal the company signed with OpenAI in 2024 for the same thing.

So in case you are keeping score: Rupert Murdoch's media empire is now getting paid $400 million by OpenAI and Meta combined to help build the systems that will eventually make its own newsrooms obsolete. And News Corp CEO Robert Thomson had the audacity to describe news organizations as valuable 'inputs' for AI. Inputs. Like raw material. Like lumber.

He is not wrong about the economics. But it is a remarkable thing to hear the CEO of a journalism company describe journalism as an input to be processed by machines.

It Gets Worse

Earlier this week, Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker publicly praised Fortune magazine for using AI to generate over 600 articles that now drive 20% of their web traffic. Let that sink in. The head of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers is cheering for the replacement of human journalism with AI slop.

Meanwhile, News Corp has quietly rolled out an in-house AI tool called NewsGPT. Some journalists inside the company have raised concerns. Nobody seems to be listening.

The strategy is now clear. Step one: sell your content to AI companies for hundreds of millions. Step two: use AI to replace the people who created that content. Step three: profit. Step four: wonder why nobody trusts media anymore.

The Bigger Picture

News Corp is not alone. The entire media industry is making the same bet. The New York Times sued OpenAI. Everyone else signed checks. The logic is simple: if AI companies are going to use your content anyway, you might as well get paid. And $150 million is real money.

But here is what the deal actually means for the future of journalism: every story the WSJ publishes, every investigation the New York Post runs, every piece of original reporting from any News Corp outlet now becomes training data for Meta's Llama models and Muse Spark. Those models will then summarize, rewrite, and redistribute that reporting directly to users who will never visit the original sites.

The EU already classified ChatGPT as a search engine this week, precisely because AI platforms are replacing the click-through model that funds journalism. Google AI Overviews are eating website traffic. Meta AI will do the same.

News Corp took the $150 million because the alternative is getting nothing while AI companies use your content regardless. That is probably the right business decision. But calling journalism an 'input' while your editor praises AI-generated articles is not a survival strategy. It is a surrender letter.