SODP Dispatch - 9 July 2026

ABC will trial using AI for journalism. What are the risks and benefits?

By Timothy Koskie

Earlier today, the ABC flagged a shift in their position on generative artificial intelligence (AI) use in their news production. Despite previous caution, a recent deal with US tech company Anthropic has opened the door for ABC staff to bring Claude AI into their broadcasting news work.

For now, the scope of this inclusion is limited, with a focus on converting radio programs into articles. However, the ABC has signalled a willingness to expand this scope to include other tasks. The broadcaster will also hire specialists to help with AI adoption.

The goal is to free up time for staff to engage in other core journalistic work, such as investigations, while also expanding the ABC’s production capabilities.

Australians have a distinctive distrust of AI tools, so it remains to be seen how the public will react to this change. On the other hand, the decision tracks with a long history of editors and journalists being early adopters of tech innovations.

Journalists already use various data tools. And it’s possible to use generative AI to augment journalistic work in valuable and unprecedented ways.

However, this comes at a time when journalism faces crises of sustainability for journalists and news – problems AI can as easily exacerbate as remedy.

The original tech-heads?

Journalists and news producers have long had not only a vested interest in innovations that might improve their busy workflows, but also a broad curiosity about the cutting edge of tools and technologies.

📊 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.

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By Vahe Arabian

🚨 How to plan for Google Discover content clusters

Most people use the Audit, Calendar, and Authority Builder as separate tools. The ones getting better results chain them together, and this is where the Discover Content Check tool comes in.

Here's the exact sequence:

1. Start with an Audit: Run it on your best-performing or most important article (New Audit → paste the URL)

2. Build the Calendar from that audit: Hit "Build Calendar" directly from the audit result — it pre-fills the calendar around that specific article, not generic topic suggestions

3. Run Discover Topic Gaps in the Authority Builder: Select the same article as the source → run "Discover Topic Gaps" → get the 5–8 supporting articles you need to build the full interest graph cluster

4. Cross-reference both outputs: Articles appearing in BOTH the calendar and the gap analysis = your highest-priority commissions They're trending AND they strengthen your authority cluster simultaneously

5. Check entity overlap before commissioning: Export the calendar to CSV → paste titles into the Authority Builder's URL field one by one → verify entity overlap with your existing content

The key insight most publishers miss:

• Google Discover ranks publishers, not just articles.

• The Calendar tells you when to publish. The Authority Builder tells you what cluster of content to build.

• Used together, you're not optimising one article — you're engineering a topic cluster that signals deep authority to Google's interest graph, which compounds distribution over time.

Practical shortcut:

1. Export the calendar to CSV, then

2. Paste the titles into the Authority Builder's URL, and

3. Field one by one to check entity overlap with your existing content before commissioning.

Agentic AI will save local media: Generative AI was useful; agentic AI is game-changing | Editor & Publisher Magazine

I don’t want to bury the lede, so I’ll start by repeating the mantra I’ve been saying for the past three years: AI will save local media. Generative AI was useful. It was interesting. It helped people write, summarize and create. But the real paradigm shift was always going to be agentic AI. I’ve spoken at several dozen conferences in front of hundreds of media executives discussing the benefits of AI, but for a long time, agentic AI was still mostly conceptual. In the past three to six months, that has changed. Agentic AI has moved from difficult and fragile to mainstream and game changing.

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AI doesn’t want your Web site | INMA

The media industry is spending a lot of time discussing AI distribution. We’re debating licensing deals, referral traffic, AI Overviews, ChatGPT citations, and whether answer engines will replace search. But there is a more fundamental question few publishers are discussing: Should Web sites be optimised for machines as well as humans? Or at least preparing to serve the machines to give optionality later? Most publisher content today is designed for Web sites. Humans arrive on a page and see headlines, navigation, images, subscription prompts, recommendation widgets, comments, and advertising.

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We asked our readers to buy, not donate. Here’s what it taught us about the new math of news. | Nieman Lab

Most people in the news business agree on at least one thing right now. As search and AI reshape how people find information, the old model of waiting for audiences to wander in is finished, and we have to build direct relationships with readers instead. The numbers are stark. When Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing habits of 900 Americans last year, it found that a Google search showing one of those AI summaries up top sent the reader on to a website just 8% of the time, versus 15% when no summary appeared. Half the clicks, gone. And that’s before you count the people skipping search entirely to ask a chatbot.

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Google's crawler math turns against it as the open web pushes back | PPC Land

For years, publishers have suspected that AI crawlers were taking far more than they were giving back. This week the suspicion turned into a number, and the number turned into a fight. On July 1, Cloudflare opened a new dashboard to its Bot Management customers that finally puts a figure on the imbalance between AI crawl traffic and the human readers that traffic is supposed to eventually send back. The ratios documented range from 118 crawls per referral at the low end to nearly 50,000 at the high end, a spread wide enough that two AI companies operating in the same market could be treating publishers in completely different ways without anyone being able to prove it before now, as PPC Land's analysis of the launch lays out.

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LinkedIn shares tips on effective posting | Social Media Today

LinkedIn shared new advice on how to maximize content performance in the app, with a simple checklist of what should be included in every LinkedIn update. The platform also shared insights into optimizing content for artificial intelligence chatbot citations, with LinkedIn content being among the most referenced source material for AI tools. First, on general posting tips. LinkedIn has shared a simple checklist for effective content creation in the app, which applies to both creators and brands. So two to three posts per week, with a question to spark ongoing discussion and engagement.

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How to make your SEO strategy more commercially aware | Search Engine Land

The SEO industry has become extraordinarily good at improving its technical craft, making strides in crawl architecture, Core Web Vitals, content frameworks, entity optimization, and link acquisition at scale, to name a few. What has lagged behind is its ability to connect that craft to the financial realities of the businesses it serves. SEO has trouble speaking the language that gets budgets approved and strategies prioritized. Getting more funding and a better seat at the table requires a shift in how SEO teams define what they’re trying to achieve. Let’s look at how SEO can become more commercially aware.

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