Beggars, choosers, AI scrapers

Watching your best people walk out the door, the end of free content, leaks about the new MFF, an entrepreneurial program for newsrooms in exile, nerdy stuff on pricing and 32 active calls.

Welcome

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Beggars, choosers, AI scrapers

• Watching your most talented people walk out the door

• The end (of free content) is nigh

• Advent calendar, but for the next big EU budget

• An entrepreneurial program for newsrooms in exile

• How much is your journalism really worth? We have data and a calculator.

• 32 active calls (5 new)

Beggars, choosers, AI scrapers

Good news first: Cloudflare stepped up in a big way. On July 1st, the company announced it's now blocking AI crawlers by default unless website owners explicitly grant permission. This makes Cloudflare the first major internet infrastructure provider to challenge the status quo: instead of assuming AI companies can scrape everything under the Sun unless told otherwise, they're now assuming they can't unless explicitly invited in by publishers.

Major players including Condé Na…