Rob Fishman

I was honored to join Jen Hollingsworth, Kellen Henry, and Richard Lui on stage for the Marsh "Re-Scripting Media Summit" a couple of weeks ago. The always thoughtful and brilliant Ana Kreacic led a very timely discussion about trust, personalization, discovery, content creation, product, and the impact on workforces in our industry (and society at large). Big topics that I know so many of us are wrestling with. Some of my takeaways: - AI can fuel deepfakes, but it’s also the most powerful detector we have—so it will shape both the problem and the cure. Or, out of necessity, the coming conflagration will spur more transparency. - AI elevates personalization when it narrows friction, not worldviews—giving customers clarity, not confinement. - Media companies can break echo chambers by designing algorithms that reward curiosity, not just comfort. - AI can shift discovery from passive feeds to dynamic, anticipatory experiences that surface what audiences didn’t know they needed. - We safeguard IP by ensuring AI tools respect rights, track sources, and generate content with transparent provenance. - Soon, everyone's job will be to manage - AI is their direct report.

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Perplexity's publisher pitch exploits industry desperation Why it matters: Publishers facing traffic declines are considering partnerships with the AI company that allegedly stole their content for years. Perplexity is positioning itself as "publisher-friendly" with a new revenue-sharing model tied to its Comet browser, just as major outlets sue the company for copyright violations. The big picture: This isn't partnership. It's damage control masquerading as industry leadership. - Publishers report they can't even get meetings with Perplexity's one-person partnerships team - The company won't reveal how much of its $42.5M fund has actually been paid out - Success depends on Comet browser adoption, but Perplexity hides usage figures Between the lines: Publishers aren't considering this deal because it's good, they're drowning and grasping for any revenue stream. The catch: "Usage-based compensation" sounds fair until you read the fine print. - Payments tied to vague metrics: access by "humans, crawlers, or AI agents" - No transparency on how usage is calculated or verified - Previous Perplexity revenue programs were "underdeveloped and opaque" What's happening: BBC, Forbes, News Corp and others are suing Perplexity for systematically bypassing content protections and scraping without permission. - The timing of this publisher outreach, amid mounting legal pressure, isn't coincidental - Publishers who created the content powering Perplexity's AI are now offered table scraps The bottom line: When your industry is collapsing and you're desperate for revenue, even exploitative partnerships can seem preferable to extinction. That doesn't make them acceptable.

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"Pivoting to AI is not a business strategy. Telling journalists they must use AI is not a business strategy. Partnering with AI companies is a business move, but becoming reliant on revenue from tech giants who are creating a machine that duplicates the work you’ve already created is not a smart or sustainable business move, and therefore it is not a smart business strategy. It is true that AI is changing the internet and is threatening journalists and media outlets. But the only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great pains to show their audiences that they are human beings." https://lnkd.in/gpxz9aPY

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At first glance, today’s film and television landscape appears to offer something for everyone. But Angel Studios—an independent film distributor, studio, and streaming service—sees things differently. It believes there’s a large, underserved audience that's been overlooked by mainstream Hollywood. (The company is often characterized as “faith-based”—and a lot of its content is religious—but it calls itself a “values-based” distributor.) And Angel has found a novel way of engaging those audience members: by allowing them to vote directly on the films and TV shows they want to see. At Fast Company's Innovation Festival, I spoke with Neal Harmon, cofounder and CEO of Angel Studios and Michael Chiklis, star of the new film The Senior, which is distributed by the company.  * We talked about the origins of Angel Studios as the app VidAngel, which edited out the profanity and sexual content from other shows and movies. Harmon says he created the app with his brothers to allow families to watch movies together. But after they were sued by Disney and filed for Chapter 11, Harmon and his brothers moved beyond omitting negative elements from content to creating and distributing content themselves. * We also explored the unique relationship Angel Studios has with its audience. The company’s Angel Guild Members get access to streaming content, tickets to see movies in theaters, and the ability to vote and even weigh in on the direction of future content. In other words, they have unprecedented control over what the company distributes and produces. * And we talked about the company’s quest to tap into mainstream audiences and while advertising its Guild Membership with highly partisan podcasters, including Megyn Kelly and Laura Trump, and penning a distribution partnership for last year’s Sound of Hope with the Daily Wire. I asked if such marketing efforts undercut the company's stated mission to create films with universal themes. Harmon said that Angel Studios is "okay with partnering with whoever wants to get these stories out there," in its quest to create “stories that unite us.” The company is threading a needle between faith, 'values,' and partisanship at a highly political time. And the stakes are high: Last week, Angel Studios went public via SPAC on the New York Stock Exchange. This was a fascinating discussion. #FCfestival

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Syndicated shows like CBS Media Ventures' Adam's Law and Warner Bros. Discovery's Jenny McCarthy-helmed talk show are emblematic of studios' efforts to create programming with streamlined budgets, according to Paige Albiniak's in-depth story on TVNewsCheck today. #media #programming #syndication https://lnkd.in/eAVV226i

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Great piece on the support required to make local news sustainable. These bits stood out to me: "Funders tend to think in terms of programmatic investment: supporting training, research, or collaborative projects that can be evaluated and scaled. But what many publishers actually need is operational capital — the ability to pay themselves, hire staff and survive long enough to build those capacities." "There’s no sustainability without stability. And there’s no stability without money that pays for people’s time, care and creativity." #journalism #media #localnews

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Here’s my hot take on using AI in journalism: We got to get better at reporting. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of drafts where it’s clear AI had a hand in the writing. Sometimes partially, sometimes almost entirely. Now, I don’t hate AI. I use it too. Sometimes I’ll run a sentence through Claud just to see if it can tighten things up. And, it often does. But here’s the problem: AI doesn’t know what matters in a story. It doesn’t know which quote to keep. The one that’s clunky but full of emotion or the one which reads well but doesn't say much. It doesn't know that the colour of someone’s shirt, the way they fidget with their hands, or how their home smells, can sometimes carry as much weight as a data point or stat. Without AI, there was one way to write well: write well. Now, there's another way: use AI. But it only works if there’s solid, detailed reporting behind it. AI might clean up our prose but it won’t sit with a grieving parent or notice how someone’s voice cracks mid-sentence. That’s still on us.

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What does an effective media campaign look like? Journalist Dan Townend unpacks the success of a recent newspaper crusade in the latest edition of Off the Record. He shares what comms pros can learn from examples like it. If you work in PR, communications or public affairs, then this week’s analysis is full of practical insights you can use right away. Subscribe to Off the Record on Substack for a look at the media landscape every Thursday... and tips on how to make it work for you. Link in the comments to read the edition 👇

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So many points in this New York Mag piece about "The Media’s Traffic Apocalypse." Here are my biggest takeaways. One: Apparently, the shiny *new* strategy in publishing is.... building a relationship with readers? If this is new to you, you've already failed. Two: "When a one-off article performed well, we’d zero in on that conceit and write ten more articles on it," said one former BI reporter. We shouldn't be surprised that readers have totally disassociated from a topic swarming, quantity over quality approach. We as journalists, editors and newsroom leaders have to hold ourselves accountable, here. Our greediness with regards to traffic has fundamentally de-valued what we do and it's why readers now don't feel as compelled to pay for subscriptions. Three: Meet readers where they are. Now more so than ever, social media platforms want to keep users on their platform, which is why the old "link in bio" is super outdated. Publishers should be strategizing about how their content will roll out across channels way more thoughtfully. "Okay, we've got this great profile with X cover star, how does this translate to reels, to the grid, to YouTube, Spotify, newsletters, etc?" The same story can be told many different ways, and "link in bio" feels really lazy and uninspired at this point. https://lnkd.in/eU6Yt5SQ

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New publisher strategies for dealing with AI companies scraping content are emerging. One group (Future plc, AP, Reuters, AFP) treats AI platforms like advertising inventory - optimize and monetize. The other (Microsoft's marketplace, ProRata, RSL) is building collective infrastructure to force payment through coordination. Neither strategy has proven yet that it can swing the pendulum around and make up for the huge AI-induced traffic losses. But both strategies are accelerating. My latest analysis for News Machines covers what happened in the past 24 months. Verified data on: • Why litigation costs $4.4M per quarter with no trial dates • How blocking AI cost major publishers 14% of human traffic • Why sites WITH licensing deals saw click-through rates collapse 6.5x faster than sites without deals • Where $65M in actual revenue is coming from (hint: structured feeds, not article licensing) • and more The piece ends with 5 learnings for publishers trying to navigate this difficult problem. What's working and what isn't, with sources you can verify yourself. If you're a media executive trying to figure out whether to optimize, block, sue, or join a collective platform - this is current as of Feb 18, 2026, and every data point is linked. https://lnkd.in/gs-bx25Z

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Stop being content suppliers for somebody else's platform...go build your own audience, says Washington Post CTO Vineet Khosla. AI will not be able to do deep journalism, which you grew up excelling at, it can only create content based on content available online. Journalists have more power. An insightful interview as publishers try to find themselves amid the changing digital ecosystem. https://lnkd.in/gBjuxm7D

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LLMs have disrupted content production in newsrooms like never before. And we still don't know the full impact of Agentic AI. As journalists, we have only one option: to continuously learn, relearn, and implement our knowledge. This disruption isn't limited to newsrooms; other content production domains are also being significantly impacted. I recently had the opportunity to be part of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras NPTEL + workshop on 'AI-Powered Content Creation & Filmmaking: From Imagination to Execution'. The session was presented by Shashwat Mookherjee CEO of IndieRise Research Labs

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The tools already exist for agentic paywalls. We just need to make bizdev deals with the platforms. The future is two Zoom calls away.

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"More fundamentally, it misunderstands what publishers sell. They do not sell access to information. Information is abundant and often free. They sell verification, curation, original reporting, investigative journalism, and the brand assurance that what you are reading is accurate and important. These are exactly the things that become more valuable as AI-generated content proliferates." 👏 👏 👏 Great piece and worth a read.

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For journalists looking for precise answers, the goal has shifted from definitive identification to a probability assessment and informed editorial judgment. https://lnkd.in/eVbm4kqd

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What AI tools are actually helping journalists and everyday professionals work smarter—not harder? On the latest episode of The AI Download, I’m joined by Sabrina Ortiz Senior AI Editor at ZDNET to talk through some underrated AI tools that are quietly reshaping how we take notes, generate captions, and streamline content production. She shares how tools like Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai are changing the game behind the scenes—and we also dig into: ✅ The most surprising AI tools from Google I/O ✅ How women’s jobs are increasingly at risk from automation ✅ Why AI might be fueling unrealistic side hustle expectations ✅ The latest on real-time translation, AI video, and more Watch or listen to the full episode now. Links in comments 👇 #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AItools #GoogleIO #Productivity #DigitalTrends

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Comedy Saved Me Podcast Debuts: How Comedy Saves Lives -- The comedy business, as a significant segment of the entertainment and media (E&M) industry, is projected to reach US$3.4 trillion by 2028, with large new revenue pools emerging in areas like advertising and streaming. https://lnkd.in/ee4-Sb74

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Fubo is trying to convince its shareholders to approve its merger with Hulu+Live. But can two unprofitable services build a profitable future together? It doesn’t look promising! https://lnkd.in/gpMT4Nd5

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Kristin Robinson and I spent the last month investigating how record labels are accumulating the rights to license their artists' music for AI training, now that partnerships have been inked with companies like Suno and Udio. We obtained multiple record deals with explicit new grants of rights for AI training - but we also heard from artist lawyers that the labels could feasibly rely on existing blanket licensing clauses to avoid approval altogether. https://lnkd.in/gdwjX3rq

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