Economist Launches ChatGPT App, Salt Lake Tribune Drops Paywall, NYT Calls AI’s Opening Act a Theft...
A quick word from our sponsor: Divee.AI is a new publisher tool designed to maximise on-page engagement. Median session: 5 min 43 sec. Pilots have logged 2,452 reader conversations and 45% reduction in bounce rate. Explainer video here…
This week’s Long Read tears down Divee.AI’s solution, and looks at how conversational layers inside articles can significantly deepen audience engagement, extend sessions, and reveal reader intent. In a recent test, a B2B trade title tested Divee’s conversational layer and time on site tripled.
Let’s crack on…
The New York Times Calls AI’s Founding Act A Theft
At the WAN-IFRA (World Association of News Publishers) Congress this week, NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger stated that AI companies willingly pay for talent, chips and energy but have a pathological unwillingness to pay for the fourth: data. As James Hewes concludes, “Data is, bluntly, the wholesale theft of creative work”. Publishers have been, “too quiet, too passive, and too fragmented”…#mustread
AI Labelling Moves From Voluntary Disclosure To Enforcement
Two big stories out of Silicon Valley: firstly, Google’s AI watermarking system, SynthID, is being added to Chrome and Search to identify AI-created content. More than 100bn images and videos are already watermarked, and the tech is being adopted by OpenAI, Nvidia, etc. Secondly, YouTube will now automatically detect and label content created by AI.
The Economist Launches A Dedicated ChatGPT App
The Economist has become the first major news publication to launch its own ChatGPT app, visualising data from its ‘Trump tracker’. The challenge? Can it put a limited product inside ChatGPT without undermining its core subscription product. Key quote: “Young audiences are adopting tools like ChatGPT as a first port of call. It’s increasing dramatically.”
SPUR Coalition Adds 30 New Members, Issues Calls For More
The coalition pushing for fair terms on AI content licensing yesterday received formal backing from WAN-IFRA and FIPP - Connecting Global Media. It is now the leading publisher coalition working to develop a balanced market ecosystem and is inviting other media organisations from around the world to join. SPUR = Standards for Publishers Usage Rights.
Trust Is the Asset Media Companies Cannot Afford to Lose
Tom Bowman (ex-Microsoft, BBC, multilocal) writes that deepfakes are turning trust into a business-critical issue for publishers. Key quote: “For media owners, the danger is not merely that fake content exists online but that audiences begin to doubt everything. In that context, verification becomes a visible product feature.” Related: AI-Writing Scandals Are Getting Very Confusing.
Google Traffic Down: 7 Solutions From 11 Years of Selling Media Companies
Leading media M&A dealmaker, Rob Toth, writes that organic Google traffic is no longer viewed as an asset to pay a premium for; it’s become a liability to discount in the valuation. How bad? With all GA accounts downtrending, his M&A Group will no longer represent any “Content + Google Traffic” media companies. But he offers a route forward…
The Salt Lake Tribune Drops Paywall, Loses Third of Revenue
The Salt Lake Tribune has pivoted 180 degrees and made its articles free to all. The pros? Reach, visibility and a stronger local, direct sales ad operation. The cons? It loses a third of its revenue, but it aims to claw this back via tiered membership offerings. The Tribune initially fundraised $2.6m from readers to finance the paywall takedown…
Staying Human Means Choosing When And How To Use AI
Ethan Mollick, Professor at UPenn, argues that most AI-writing takes mental effort to decode but gives little meaning in return (aka “attention vampire”). For journalists, balancing AI with their own mental abilities is going to be one of the defining challenges moving forwards. Key quote: “A small difference in how you use AI can lead to big outcome differences”. The best opinion piece of 2026.
Google Drops FAQ-Rich Results From Search
Google has finally killed off FAQ-rich results, after quietly phasing them out for the past three years. The change has now come into full effect with Search Console reporting disappearing. You can still keep FAQ schema on pages, but it won’t get you those expandable Google FAQ boxes anymore.
JournalismAI Skills Lab Opens For 2026
Following last year’s successful trial, this free, 14-week virtual programme is aimed at editorial and product staff looking to build LLMs, GenAI and agents in a practical newsroom setting. Participants will develop their own AI tools, prototypes or proofs-of-concept. JournalismAI is a collaboration between Polis and Google News Initiative. Applications close 21 June.
In partnership with Bridged, WNIP has created Media Genie - a smarter way to explore 17 years of publishing insight. Ask a question about the media business and get a direct answer grounded in WNIP’s archive. 👇
AI Tool: Verify My Writing
VMW uses best-in-class analytic tech to scan, score, and certify written content as human-made, and not generated by AI. The fully proven system assures that writing was human-made by creating independent, tamper-proof, and sharable certifications that can be verified by anyone, for free. Built by Derek Newton, author of The Cheat Sheet, and a world expert on academic integrity...
Report: The Zero-Click Content Shift
Written by respected media analyst, Peter Houston, this report gauges the impact of Google’s AI Overviews on publisher traffic, and tries to get a sense of how big the threat really is. The report includes some exclusive data from a bespoke survey into attitudes and effects of zero-click. Free to download…#WoodWing
Event: Future of Media Tech Conference
Organised by the New Statesman Media Group (NSMG), this one day deep dive promises to cover the entire spectrum of media tech: AI, automation, revenue strategies, newsroom transformation, etc. 10th Sept | London | £195 early bird [Speakers incl John Slade, CEO of The FT and Mitali Mukherjee from Reuters Institute]
How Conversational Layers Triple Time on Site for Publishers
The average reader spends just 29 seconds on a publisher article. Divee.AI adds a conversational layer designed to keep readers engaged and on-page for longer. [Sponsored feature].
According to Chartbeat’s Q4 2024 data, the average reader spends just 29 seconds engaged with a publisher article.
You probably already knew that. Most editorial teams have seen the number somewhere, a Chartbeat dashboard, a quarterly review slide, a conference presentation that confirmed what you already suspected. Twenty-nine seconds. Less than a minute for a piece that took hours to report, write, edit, and publish.
Where readers go when they leave is the more interesting question.
Mostly, they go to ask something.
A reader gets three paragraphs in and hits something, a term they’re not sure about, a statistic they want to check, a thread they want to follow. Standard response: open a new tab, search, land somewhere else. The article is still open but the session is effectively over. They’re not coming back.
This mid-session leak is a distinct problem from traffic acquisition. Google traffic for publishers dropped 33% over the last year, per Chartbeat. That story has been well covered. The quieter version is the reader who already arrived, was interested enough to click, and left because the article didn’t answer a question they formed while reading it.
Why Readers Leave After They Click
Some publishers have started treating this as a product problem, not just an editorial one.
In a recent test, a B2B trade title tested Divee’s conversational layer on its article pages. Readers could ask questions and get answers sourced from the article itself, without navigating away. After adding the layer, time on site tripled, page views per session reached 2.8x baseline, and bounce rate dropped 45%. The session duration comparison is the number worth sitting with: 5 minutes 43 seconds average for readers who engaged, versus the 29-second industry baseline. That kind of gap rarely comes from layout tweaks or headline tests.
Looking back, it’s not complicated. A reader who gets to ask a question, from your content, on your page, has a different experience than one who doesn’t. They went deeper. They stayed. The article did something it doesn’t normally do: it responded.
What Reader Questions Tell Publishers
The audience intelligence angle is something publishers tend not to anticipate going in. Every question a reader types is a statement about what they came for. Across early publisher deployments, 92% of questions come in freeform - no prompts, no pre-loaded suggestions. Readers treat it like a genuine conversation. What you get back is declared reader intent, in their own words.
For any title navigating audience measurement since third-party cookie deprecation started in earnest, the signal quality matters. Intent signals from reader questions, what topics they’re probing, where coverage has gaps, what vocabulary they use, are actual expressed interest. That’s a different category from what most analytics stacks generate from behavioural inference.
Publisher scepticism on implementation is earned. Most editorial tech that promises a quick install delivers a months-long project. This is a single script tag, live in under 10 minutes on WordPress, Webflow, React, or custom HTML. Publishers who’ve been most reluctant to try it tend to find that part the most surprising.
Whether conversational article layers become a standard format or stay a differentiator for early movers remains unclear. The 29-second baseline, though, probably isn’t just a measurement problem. It’s a signal. Readers are leaving at the moment of highest interest, when they wanted to know more. The gap is in what happens at that moment.
Divee is the widget behind the publisher results described here. One script tag, no CMS changes, live in under 10 minutes. divee.ai
Full Explainer Video: https://tinyurl.com/yfbssp2d
Demo Live on Page: https://tinyurl.com/bdcwd29j
Hat tip: Monojoy Bhattacharjee, Simon Owens, Rob Toth, Tom Bowman, Diana Savu, Stephen Jones, Derek Newton, Lagos PT, Praia Da Rocha, Yamaha FZ8