Meta pays News Corp for the right to feed news to its AI

Just a couple of years ago, media companies and tech giants were fighting a war of lawsuits and public accusations. Today they are sitting down at the negotiating table. Meta Platforms has signed a licensing agreement with News Corp, one of the world's largest media empires, owned by the Murdoch family. Under the deal, Mark Zuckerberg's company gets the right to use content from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, MarketWatch and other titles in the group to run its Meta AI chatbot and to train language models.

To grasp the scale, it helps to recall the context. News Corp is not just a collection of newspapers. It is a global media machine that controls dozens of titles in the US, the UK and Australia. The Wall Street Journal remains one of the most influential business publications in the world, and its archives hold a huge body of structured, verified and current information, exactly what language models lack when they try to give accurate and reliable answers. For Meta, the deal means a qualitative leap in the reliability of its AI assistant: instead of generating answers from outdated or unverified data, Meta AI will now be able to cite authoritative sources in real time.

News Corp, however, is far from a newcomer to such negotiations. Back in 2023 the company struck a similar agreement with OpenAI, valued at $250 million over five years, according to The Wall Street Journal. Deals with Google and Apple followed later. Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who runs the media empire, have clearly chosen to monetize content through licensing rather than endless litigation. And that strategy appears to be paying off: each new deal reinforces the precedent that quality journalism has a very concrete market value in the AI economy.

The financial terms of the Meta–News Corp agreement have not been officially disclosed. But given the scale of comparable deals and the volume of content Meta is getting access to, analysts put the value at tens of millions of dollars per year. For Meta, whose quarterly revenue exceeds $40 billion, that is a rounding error in the budget. For News Corp, which is going through the difficult times of the traditional media business, it is a substantial and, more importantly, stable source of income.

The deal raises a fundamental question about the future of the information ecosystem. On one hand, licensing agreements look like a fair compromise: publishers get paid for their content, and tech companies get legal access to quality data. On the other hand, a system is taking shape in which users increasingly stop visiting publishers' sites, getting a digest of the information directly in a chatbot. It is the classic dilemma: short-term licensing income against long-term loss of audience and advertising revenue. The New York Times, for example, has refused such deals on principle and chose to sue OpenAI, arguing that no licensing payments can compensate for the destruction of a business model built on direct contact with the reader.

There is another nuance that is often overlooked. Meta is developing its AI assistant not just as a standalone product but as an integrated feature across all its platforms: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. This means News Corp's news content could become available to billions of users who have never opened The Wall Street Journal in their lives. In terms of reach, this is unprecedented distribution. But for journalism, a question arises: will the original material keep its value when a language model retells it in three sentences, without context, nuance or an author's voice?

In the broader picture, the Meta–News Corp deal is one more brick in the foundation of a new media economy, in which tech platforms become not merely distribution channels but the main consumers of journalistic content. The market for licensing data for AI could, according to analyst forecasts, reach several billion dollars in the coming years. The only question is whether this will be a lifeline for quality journalism or its slow absorption by algorithms. For now, nobody knows the answer, including the people signing these multimillion-dollar contracts.

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and is banned in Russia.