MARSEILLE, France – In a landmark collective move to defend media intellectual property and sustainable journalism in the age of generative artificial intelligence, around 30 major media organizations from Europe and North America have joined a growing coalition launched by three of the UK’s most prominent news players: the BBC, Sky News, and The Guardian. The coalition, known as SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights), was formed specifically to push large AI developers to compensate news outlets fairly for utilizing their copyrighted content to train large language models.
Newly announced members of the expanding alliance cover leading national and regional media groups across multiple continents, including France’s CMA Media, Switzerland’s Ringier, and leading Canadian organizations such as The Globe and Mail and public broadcaster CBC/Radio Canada. Jean-Christophe Tortora, Deputy Chief Executive of CMA Media, outlined the coalition’s core mission to attendees of the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) global gathering hosted this week in Marseille, the coastal port city in southern France.
Tortora emphasized that leading news publishers across the globe are ready to rewrite the rules of their long-standing imbalanced relationship with big technology firms and global regulatory bodies. He called for a sweeping “new deal” that centers three non-negotiable priorities: equitable value-sharing between news creators and AI developers, robust legal protections for copyrighted journalistic content, and the preservation of independent, fact-based journalism that serves public interest.
SPUR was first co-founded earlier this year by a core group of major European and UK-based media companies, which in addition to the BBC, Guardian, and Sky News, includes the Financial Times, Telegraph Media Group, and pan-European publisher Mediahuis. The alliance’s expansion to more than 30 member organizations comes as the entire global news industry grapples with growing existential uncertainty over its future business model, a topic that dominated discussions across the three-day WAN-IFRA conference. The widespread uncompensated scraping of news content to train AI systems has emerged as the most pressing threat to publisher revenue in decades.
The urgency of the industry’s concerns was highlighted just days before the Marseille conference, when New York Times publisher Arthur Gregg Sulzberger told U.S. lawmakers that major tech companies engage in outright “strip-mining” of news websites, harvesting millions of articles without consent or any form of payment to build and improve their AI products. In line with this criticism, SPUR’s core position holds that professional news content requires enormous financial investment from publishers to produce, and AI companies that profit from this content have a clear obligation to pay a fair market rate for its use.
To turn its mission into action, the coalition has laid out two key initial goals. First, it plans to develop dedicated industry infrastructure that will allow publishers to accurately track and measure how often and in what ways AI systems access and utilize their journalistic content. Second, SPUR will lead collective negotiations to establish clear, scalable frameworks that let AI developers license news content legally and transparently.
Anna Bateson, chief executive of Guardian Media Group and one of SPUR’s founding members, called the rapid expansion of the coalition a turning point for the global movement. “Welcoming 30 new members… gives SPUR the scale required to turn its mission into a global mandate,” Bateson said. She added that the collective weight of the alliance will lend legitimacy to the industry-led standards SPUR is developing, protecting publishers’ intellectual property while also giving AI developers a clear path to enter into legal, sustainable licensing agreements that work for both sides.
Looking ahead to the upcoming G7 leaders summit being hosted this month in the French Alpine town of Evian, Tortora called on French President Emmanuel Macron to prioritize the global publishing industry’s concerns during the gathering of world leaders, pushing for regulatory and political support for the coalition’s push for fair compensation.