Last week, as the World News Media Congress kicked off in Marseille, there was a sense among the audience that something big was about to happen. This is an annual event where editorial and tech people congregate; those accused of being “resistant to change” sit alongside those accused of “ruining our civilisation”.
This year’s keynote speaker was New York Times boss Arthur Gregg “AG” Sulzberger – something of a legend in media circles and creator of a visionary report published more than a decade ago in which he defined the importance of a digital future for media.
I am the former editor-in-chief of South Africa’s Daily Maverick and founder of Project Kontinuum, a global network which seeks to bolster the chance of independent journalism’s survival, and as such I have attended many such conferences over the years. Sulzberger’s fiery speech was the first that left me feeling that a real war is coming and that we actually stand a chance.
“AG” has led the New York Times since 2018, overseeing growth from 1,400-odd journalists to more than 2,300 today in the organisation’s core team. The company is clearly healthy, dominant and almost effortlessly profitable, sporting the greatest number of subscribers in the news industry – 13 million, and still growing at a healthy clip. (However, to put things into perspective, it is still only a third of the subscribers commanded by the smallest of the big TV streaming services, Peacock, as Sulzberger noted earlier the same day in a smaller meeting.)
Compare the NYT’s success with the traditional US news media and it becomes mind-bogglingly huge: this is one of the few big players that has fought multiple wars and come out on top.
And yet in AI, and OpenAI in particular, the NYT has met an opponent that it could not wrestle easily. Sulzberger and his team originally tried old-style, behind-the-scenes diplomacy, pointing to the clear and obvious damage these new barbarians at the gates were causing by – well, stealing, cheating and being generally barbaric. OpenAI’s brush-off was increasingly clear and dismissive, growing in sync with the personality cult of chief executive Sam Altman. The gaslighting was deliberate: OpenAI surely knew that in any world that was even remotely fair, they would have had to pay a punishing amount of money to the news media, the very institution they desired to replace.
The second phase dawned in late December 2023, when the NYT finally sued OpenAI. Its argument was simple: the AI company was violating the paper’s copyright, using data without consent and damaging the brand.
Turning the other cheek to Big Tech was about as good a strategy as trying to appease Donald Trump
Thirty months and $20m later, Sulzberger has obviously had enough of being quiet. The original sin of theft has helped AI companies grow into an $11 trillion edifice, reshaping the face of humanity faster than ever before in peacetime. Another 30 months in legal limbo, with no precedent created for the rest of the news media, and any court decision will mean zero if you are dead.
The time had come for Sulzberger to call the spade a nuclear weapon, and Marseille in early June was as good a place as any.
In short, the speech delivered. (Read it.)
The New York Times’ boss AG Sulzberger gives the keynote speech in Marseille on 1 June 2026. Photo: Miguel Medina / AFP/ Getty
Sulzberger’s argument against a single company, OpenAI, has (finally) morphed into an argument against “them” – the entirety of Big Tech. His opponents were cast as criminals: ones who did not accept the commandments against lying, cheating and stealing.
As his biblical-grade language echoed through Marseille’s Palais du Pharo, I scanned the stony faces of the tech-aligned media executives present. There were too many to count, so I gave up.
My own astonishment at the spectacle arose from something different: this may have finally marked the moment when Sulzberger and his class gave up on working with Big Tech.
It could not have happened a day too soon. Valuable years have been lost in expecting that there could be a future in which the two industries could respect each other and coexist peacefully. That was a fool’s bargain. Turning the other cheek to Big Tech was about as good a strategy as trying to appease Donald Trump.
Their channels, data centres, social media freak-offs and artificial synapses have been fed, nourished and cleansed by the data we provide and the information of relevance to humanity uniquely created by the news media over decades, and even centuries.
The AI industry’s own obvious media moves were for decades shielded from legal scrutiny by “Section 230”, a freakishly badly formulated and badly interpreted piece of US legislation that in effect meant the thieves were protected by the judges.
But they were also protected by a comically disunited mainstream media in developed countries, whose leaders kept believing that as long as their own companies could take a few cents off Big Tech’s table, they themselves would be all right. What they completely missed, it appears, was the bigger picture. Their individual victories were all pyrrhic while the bigger war was being lost.
This is not a relationship of equals – especially not when the US political and justice system is skewed towards the ones with bigger bank accounts
The Geeks of 2006 have grown into the Freaks of 2026 – and even the New York Times has had to admit it.
With all its power, the world’s healthiest media organisation only makes in annual revenues what Google’s parent company, Alphabet, earns every three days (and Meta in less than seven). This is not a relationship of equals – and especially not when the US political and justice system is hopelessly skewed towards the ones with bigger bank accounts. That was clear from Sulzberger’s speech: things could never be the same again.
But there were also the signs of an emerging understanding that we’re all in this together. A few years too late, but welcome anyway. There he was, the publisher of the mightiest brand in our media universe, acknowledging the actual existence of that same universe – regretting the closure of thousands of smaller titles in the US and globally, and calling for a united response to the menace of Big Tech.
I do not doubt that the world’s major brands will find a way to survive, and some will thrive no matter what – but they will do it in a serious and dangerous isolation that will grow more dire with the extinction of the current media ecosystem, which has been nourishing them for decades.
Global media brands must understand that we’re not enemies to each other, but neighbours in an increasingly impoverished part of town after the cool kids visited, took everything of value and then moved on to rule the world, leaving us to fight for scraps. We’re dead if we continue prosecuting this new war on our own. We need leaders like AG Sulzberger to spell it out, loudly and clearly.
And if Sulzberger is to succeed, he needs to start talking about the bigger picture for all news media, and then come up with a meaningful plan that thousands of battered newsrooms worldwide can sign up to.
His Marseille speech was indeed powerful and well-received. But If nothing is done in its wake, it will remain just that: a very good speech.
Branko Brkic is the founder of Project Kontinuum and the former editor-in-chief of the Daily Maverick in South Africa