Wall Street gave up on newspapers 20 years ago. The CEO of the company that powers a chunk of the internet is betting the other way.
Matthew Prince thinks AI - the same technology everyone says will kill local journalism - is about to save it. His proof is the small-town paper he owns.
Prince went on stage in Washington and said it plainly. Big legacy media gets crushed. Small local outlets enter a golden era.
Why the split? AI can repackage national news in seconds. But it can't sit in a school board meeting. It can't walk a farmer's field. That reporting has to come from a human with a notebook.
Prince bought a small Park City, Utah paper back in 2023. He says money from AI licensing - when AI companies pay publishers to use their content to train models - could beat his digital ad revenue this year.
Prince saved his sharpest words for Google. He said the company went from internet hero to villain.
His claim: Google has told publishers they can either let their content train AI or get dropped from search results. Losing Google search traffic is like losing half your storefront overnight.
He also dropped a stat. Google pulls about 3x more data from the average webpage than OpenAI, and 5x more than Microsoft or Anthropic.
His take was blunt. "Everything that's wrong with the world today is Google's fault. That's too strong, but only slightly too strong."
Cloudflare ($NET) sits right in the middle of this fight. The company handles about a fifth of all internet traffic. It's been pushing standard rules so publishers can charge AI companies in a predictable way.
That's a new revenue stream for Cloudflare. And a lifeline for small publishers. Prince points out that OpenAI already pays for access - he wants that to become the norm.
Keep an eye on AI licensing deals at the local level. If Prince is right, the next big media story doesn't look like CNN or the New York Times. It looks like the paper that covers your town.