Innovation at the Edge

The news industry is undergoing a period of deep uncertainty and rapid change. Big tech companies have scraped and monetized newsrooms’ intellectual property at scale, and legal challenges to this new reality are unfolding at a glacial pace. Today, newsrooms hoping to leverage the latest AI must rely on tools that were created through copyright violation. Our organization, the Frontier Collective, is leading an ambitious effort to create tools under a joint governance structure that allows the news industry to confront this threat head-on, and to build a journalist-controlled large language model with collectively stewarded data. By co-designing this tool with partner newsrooms, Frontier Collective creates tools that fit into news professionals’ workflows from the bottom-up, providing news organizations with greater self-determination over their own work products, AI tools, and revenue streams.