The Media Copilot

Hugging Face’s media liaison talks trust, tech, and why the next great newsroom might look more like a dev team.

This week on The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal welcomes Florent Daudens, longtime Canadian journalist and now Press Lead at Hugging Face, the open-source powerhouse behind many of the AI models driving today’s innovation.

Florent’s unique position—right at the intersection of the developer world and the...

There's something in TollBit's latest State of the Bots report that really jumped out at me. The major AI companies—notably Meta, OpenAI, and Google—have essentially given themselves permission to ignore robots.txt for their user agents. In the big picture of AI scraping it might seem like a detail, but it feels to me like a turning point from liberally interpreting the mechanisms for protecting content to brazenly flouting...

What does it take to get AI to notice your content? Scrunch AI’s Chris Andrew shares the secret sauce.

On this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal welcomes Chris Andrew, CEO of Scrunch AI, to unravel the mysteries of AI-driven search. As AI platforms increasingly summarize news without driving traffic back to publishers, the game of visibility is changing. Chris explains how Scrunch AI is helping content creators understand an...

AI risk and the tenacity required.

In this special episode of The Media Copilot podcast, we're diving into the seismic shifts AI is causing in digital publishing. I recently hosted a webinar on AI Risk and Resilience for Publishers, where we unpacked how AI search engines are disrupting traditional traffic flows and what that means for content creators. The implications are significant: if audiences no longer need to visit p...

When chatbots summarize your reporting instead of sending audiences to your website, who really wins—and how can creators fight back?

Ahmed Malik, CEO of ScalePost, joins The Media Copilot to unpack the act of AI disintermediation. It’s a term that’s thrown around a lot, but it’s just a fancy word for when an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Perplexity writes a summary based on a topic instead of directing a person to a website.

Tha...

Jane Barrett, Head of AI Strategy at Reuters, joins The Media Copilot to share how one of the world’s largest news agencies is actively shaping the future of AI in journalism—without crossing the line on trust.

AI is rewriting the rules of content, but who’s writing the rules for AI in newsrooms? At Reuters, Jane Barrett is making sure they’re not written for them. As Head of AI Strategy, Barrett has led one of the most ambitious an...

Jonathan Roberts of Dotdash Meredith unpacks how one of the largest digital publishers is adapting to AI and the changing nature of online audiences.

The media business is no stranger to disruption—but AI is changing the rules of engagement faster than most companies can respond. At Dotdash Meredith, Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Jonathan Roberts is trying to stay not just afloat, but ahead. This week on The Media Copilot, I talk wit...

A revealing conversation with NewsGuard’s Steven Brill on trust, truth, and the battle for clean data in the AI age.  The AI era is rewriting the rules of media — but what happens when disinformation sneaks into the algorithms shaping what we see and believe?

This week on The Media Copilot, I sat down with Steven Brill, a legend in the journalism world and co-founder of NewsGuard, the company working to restore trust in news. St...

By using AI, hyperlocal news platform Patch expanded from 1,100 to over 30,000 communities in a matter of months. How they did it without creating slop.

This week on The Media Copilot, I sat down with Warren St. John, CEO of Patch, to explore how AI is driving this exponential growth. Patch’s AI-powered newsletters can now spin up hyperlocal updates for virtually any ZIP code in the U.S., offering a new model for personalized, commu...

We're slashing the price of our AI course for PR and media professionals for one day only.

The results from the first cohort of AI for PR & Media Professionals are in. The six-week AI training course closed on Tuesday with two dozen students showing capstone projects that incorporated advanced AI techniques like automations and custom tooling, often pairing them with popular tools like Perplexity and Claude. The AI-enhanced work...

When Dow Jones’ business intelligence service went down the path of AI, it was determined to avoid stepping on any copyright mines.

This week on The Media Copilot, I sat down with Traci Mabrey, General Manager of Factiva, the business intelligence platform from Dow Jones. Unlike many AI companies that scrape publicly available data without permission, Factiva has secured licensing agreements with all 5,000 of its content provide...

For decades, local journalism has been in decline—shrinking budgets, newsroom closures, and disappearing community coverage have left behind what experts call "news deserts." But could AI change that? Could it actually help rebuild local news, making it more accessible, efficient, and sustainable?

This week on The Media Copilot, I sat down with Mark Riley, former Senior VP of Innovation at Dow Jones and founder of Math...

AI is rewriting the rules of media, but not all change is for the better. As AI slop floods the internet, the battle over quality, ethics, and authenticity has never been more urgent.

This week on The Media Copilot, I sat down with Kate Knibbs, senior writer at Wired, to dissect the murky world of AI-powered content farms. Her investigative reporting on how SEO masterminds are snapping up legacy media domains—like The Hairpin—to chu...

AI is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape, but who ensures that publishers get fairly compensated for their content?

AI is changing the way people tell stories — both PR professionals and journalists. Is it possible both might lose the most important part: authenticity?

AI is transforming the newsroom, redefining how journalists gather and analyze information, and pushing the boundaries of efficiency and storytelling.

AI is redefining how PR professionals and journalists collaborate, bringing new efficiencies while challenging the balance of authenticity and connection.

AI tools are becoming essential partners for writers and creators, opening new possibilities for research, storytelling, and bringing ideas to life.

From custom news summaries to uncovering biases, AI can do a lot more than follow trends.