SODP Dispatch - 20 August 2026

New laws to make tech companies pay for news will help, but there are 4 key problems

 By Caroline Fisher & Sora Park

The government has finally tabled its News Bargaining Incentive legislation to make big tech companies pay for the Australian journalism they use on their platforms.

The government developed these laws to fix a problem with the original News Media Bargaining Code introduced under the Morrison government.

While the code generated between $200 million and $250 million a year through deals struck with Meta and Google, it allowed them to stop making deals with news companies by not carrying news on their platform.

The new laws aim to close this loophole by making social media and search companies strike deals with eligible news publishers, or pay a charge based on their Australian digital advertising revenue, which would be distributed to news organisations through the News Journalism Payment Scheme.

While setting up new revenue streams for struggling newsrooms is a welcome move, the laws themselves are far from perfect.

How would the laws work?

The News Bargaining Incentive is made up of a couple of parts.

First, the government wants large social media and search companies with an annual digital advertising revenue of more than $250 million in Australia – likely to include digital giants such as Google, Meta and TikTok – to enter deals with at least eight eligible Australian news businesses.

If they fail to strike enough deals, they will be forced to pay a charge: 2.5% of their Australian digital advertising revenue.

To encourage deals, the charge is offset by 150%, and this increases to 200% if the deal is with small or medium-sized businesses.

📊 Publisher Revenue Dinner Miami 2026

We are hosting a private dinner in Miami for senior revenue leaders across news, gaming, newsletter, specialist, and brand publishing. This dinner is for publishing professionals who are actively driving revenue strategy and want a candid, peer-level conversation on how to win the biggest commercial quarter of the year. If you are a Chief Revenue Officer, CEO, Programmatic Head, or Partnerships Director making decisions around yield, inventory, first-party data, and Q4 growth, this evening is designed for you.

Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Time: 6:30 PM
Venue: Coral Room, Rusty Pelican Miami Restaurant, 3201 Rickenbacker Cwy, Key Biscayne, FL 33149, United States

What you will walk away with

• Practical yield, personalisation, and first-party data moves that are lifting revenue per visit right now

• A candid read on how your peers are pricing, packaging, and positioning inventory for the Q4 surge

• Insight into which new formats — video, newsletters, and creator partnerships — are actually paying in 2026

• An attendee-only summary of the evening's key insights and growth playbooks shared around the table

The dinner is high-trust, collaborative, and entirely off-the-record under Chatham House Rule. No panels, no pitches, no slides — just one focused evening on how to make every session, impression, and first-party signal work at full value in publishing's most important quarter.

Seats are strictly limited to 15 attendees.

A big thank you to Ezoic for co-hosting this evening with us.

Apply for your seat here ▸

🎯 LiveRamp × OpenAI: Measure Your ChatGPT Ad Performance

If you're running or planning ads on ChatGPT, you can now close the measurement gap. LiveRamp's Conversions API (CAPI) Hub connects directly to ChatGPT ad campaigns via secure server-to-server data connections, meaning you get reliable conversion tracking without depending on browser-based signals that often break or go missing.

In practice, this means you can:

• See which ChatGPT campaigns are actually driving conversions — not just clicks

• Optimize spend in real time based on accurate performance data

• Justify and grow your ChatGPT ad budget with measurement data you can trust

As consumer journeys shift toward AI-powered platforms, this gives marketers the infrastructure to keep up, connecting data, measuring impact, and proving ROI on one of the fastest-growing ad surfaces in the world.

Read more ▸

By Vahe Arabian

📊 The AI Citation Controls Publishers Have and Aren't Using

One number frames the year: People Inc. lost 800 million Google sessions between Q1 2024 and Q1 2026. That is the environment in which publishers finally won the controls they had been demanding for three years, and in which almost none of them are being used.

What Landed in Twelve Months

• December: RSL 1.0 shipped with 1,500-plus organisations behind it, putting machine-readable licensing terms on top of robots.txt.

• February: Bing launched first-party AI citation reporting, then rewrote its Webmaster Guidelines with directive-by-directive AI guidance and named Generative Engine Optimisation in formal policy.

• June: The UK's CMA ordered Google to give publishers an opt-out from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI summaries in Discover, plus an opt-out from model training. Google is rolling that toggle out globally.

That is more granular control over AI use of publisher archives than has existed at any point since ChatGPT launched.

Almost nobody is going to flip any of it.

Why Publishers Aren't Acting

• Paul Bannister (Raptive) called Google's version "a light switch while keeping the power plant running."

• Stuart Forrest (formerly of Bauer) points to the core reason: Google has broken out AI impressions but not AI clicks, so publishers cannot model what leaving costs them.

• Phil Andraos (Reuters) put it more simply: "There's not enough data."

• Thomas Lue Lytzen (Ekstra Bladet) expects most publishers to stay in because they fear the unknown.

So the industry now holds a set of levers it cannot price. That is the real story of 2026.

The Part That Should Bother You More

One of these controls is nearly three years old, fully documented, free, and reversible — and most publishing teams still cannot tell you their setting.
Bing gave publishers nocache and noarchive on 22 September 2023.

• nocache — Your page stays referenceable in Copilot answers, but Bing displays only the URL, title, and snippet. Microsoft also states that for nocache content, only URLs, titles, and snippets may be used in training its generative AI foundation models.

• noarchive — Your content is excluded from Copilot answers, is not linked to in them, and is not used for foundation model training.

The catch: Publish both on the same page and Bing ignores the stricter one. Microsoft's documentation is unambiguous: "If content has both NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE tags, we will treat it as NOCACHE."

The permissive rule wins. Any team that layered noarchive over nocache believing it had locked its archive out of Microsoft's training corpus has not.

Two Things Follow

1. Paywalled sites: Microsoft actively recommends adding nocache alongside noarchive so paywalled articles stay discoverable at URL, title, and snippet level. Its own note is that most paywall sites use noarchive on its own and lose that discoverability by accident.

Rich citation: As of February, Bing recommends against nocache on anything you want richly cited in Copilot, flags that nosnippet and data-nosnippet can degrade citation quality, and has added a data-snippet attribute so publishers can specify exactly what it may cite.

None of this surfaces in a rankings report. Content carrying either tag still appears in standard Bing search results — Microsoft is explicit on that — so the only place the loss registers is in AI citation data.

Why This Is a Leverage Question, Not a Technical One

Your directive stack is an IP position. When you sit down opposite a platform to negotiate a licensing deal:

"We have been excluded from your training corpus since 2023" — is a materially different opening hand than —

"We have been feeding you for three years and only just noticed."

Most publishers cannot currently tell you which of those two sentences is true about their own site.

Nobody can force AI clickthrough data out of Google this quarter. But you can know your own permission map, and almost nobody does. That is the cheapest leverage available right now — and it is sitting in your page templates.

What you should Do This Week

• Audit your templates. Pull your indexed URLs and check the robots and bingbot meta on every template — article, paywall, evergreen, syndicated. Record who set each one and when. If nobody can answer, that is the finding.

• Check your data. Open the Bing AI Performance report. It is the only first-party AI citation data any search platform currently publishes, and it will tell you what your current settings are actually costing or earning.

• Decide deliberately. Go template by template, rather than inheriting a decision someone made in 2023 for a reason nobody wrote down.

One Scope Note Before You Act

This is Bing and Copilot. Google's controls are a separate system with separate vocabulary in a separate console. ChatGPT is no longer a straight pass-through of Bing's index either — OpenAI crawls with OAI-SearchBot and has been building its own.

One decision does not carry across all three. That is exactly the problem.

Happy to walk you through any of it.

Michigan State University is training journalists for an unpredictable tomorrow | Editor & Publisher Magazine

When JaTasia Powers arrived at The Detroit News for her design internship, she expected the newsroom she’d seen countless times on television — reporters racing on deadlines, editors shouting across crowded desks, the hum of organized chaos. Instead, she found something quieter. “Because I only went into the office once a week and many people worked on a hybrid schedule, I rarely saw the newsroom completely full,” Powers said.

Read more ▸

News Corp Australia leans into print history for digital retention success | INMA

At News Corp Australia, the future of digital retention relies on something decidedly old-school: furniture. In a time when publishers are struggling with retention — something Amy Bissett, the company’s director of distribution, referred to as the industry’s “collective white whale” — News Corp Australia decided to look to the past for answers. With 1.16 million subscribers across its portfolio, Bissett told attendees at the recent INMA Asia-Pacific News Media Summit that acquisition is not the problem: “For us, we knew how to get them in,” she said. “It was how do we get them to stay?”

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Google’s new AI tool helps fact-checkers investigate AI fakes | NiemanLab

Every day the fact-checking team for one of India’s largest news organizations works to debunk a slew of false and misleading images circulating across social media. For the six-person team at India Today, that might include addressing an AI-generated archival photograph of a politician, a clip of deadly flooding ripped from its original context, or a full-on deepfake of India’s richest man. Backstory, an experimental tool from Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, is helping India Today sort through this stream of slop, scams, and disinformation.

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Reddit’s AI is turning posts into podcasts and short videos | The Verge

Reddit is trying out a new way for people to take in content on Reddit: by turning text posts into audio / video content. As part of an experiment, some posts are being adapted into videos that use AI voices to read the text of the main post and some comments. The video highlights the text as it’s read by the AI voice, and under the video, a note says that it’s a “Real conversation voiced by AI.” An old post in r/boardgames from eight years ago with 101 responses to a request for good road trip games that adults will like is an example of Reddit’s AI at work.

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Clicks Are Down 42%, LinkedIn Reach Down 47% But You’re Raging At The Wrong Target | SEJ

The rage filling your LinkedIn feed this month, the algorithm rants, the Substack discovery complaints, the essays announcing the machines have finally won, is built on real numbers pointed at the wrong conclusion. That is the argument Tony Uphoff made in his Substack post. (Uphoff and I both worked at Ziff-Davis between 1988 and 1993. Even then, every platform shift in trade publishing got treated by somebody in the industry as the end of the business.)

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State of the Community Survey Finds Three in Four Feel Worse About WordPress, but 90% Agree on What Matters | The Repository

Nearly three in four people surveyed about their experience in the WordPress community say they feel worse about the project than they did two years ago — but they haven’t left. The WP Open Community Collective has published the results of its State of the Community 2026 survey, the first independent, anonymous survey measuring sentiment across the WordPress ecosystem. The nonprofit released the findings yesterday alongside the full aggregate data, the survey instrument, and its methodology, all on GitHub under a Creative Commons license so anyone can review the data.

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