Our Hometown Blog

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[MUSIC]

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>> Hey, it’s a high five.

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How’s it going, Cliff?

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Welcome, and Sabrina from Main Street,

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Tennessee, relatively new Our-Hometown customer, welcome.

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We’re going to probably just start right on time here.

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We’re expecting a pretty intimate group.

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This is like a niche subject,

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more so than I expected.

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But I’ve got Christopher on the call with me.

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Anyone at Our-Hometown probably knows Christopher.

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He’s been with the company how many years now?

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>> I think it’s pushing a decade.

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>> Yeah, a decade.

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Just pretty much like we started around the same time.

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You were definitely here before me even.

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Christopher just does a little bit of everything,

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and lately he’s been spending a lot of time researching the industry impacts of AI.

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Anyone on our newsletter list probably sees us talking about this a lot.

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We really felt like this topic today was an important one.

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We’ve been talking about all the benefits of AI,

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but this is like the downside that you got to watch out for.

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This is all stuff that we’re learning about all the time,

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and we’re open to ideas on how to approach

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these issues and questions at any time.

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I think we’ve got definitely a good group to get started with.

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If everyone can locate the chat and just give us a quick hello,

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we’ll use the webinar chat to go back and forth,

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just so that I know that you can all hear me and you know where the chat is.

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Just quick hello, your name,

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maybe in the paper you’re with.

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That would be awesome.

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Christopher is from Our-Hometown, Rochester.

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I grew up there, but I’m out in Salt Lake City now,

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so we got pretty wide ranging attendance.

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Terry, welcome from Brockport, New York. Awesome.

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Right. I didn’t see you on the registration list, Cliff.

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Great to have you.

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Cliff from Ohio, the Clintonville spotlight been with us.

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Probably six or seven years now, I think.

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I remember bringing you on board.

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Great. Hello, everyone.

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If you’d like to ask a question, 2017.

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Yeah, right about six years.

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If you’d like to ask a question or join the conversation at any point,

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don’t hesitate to just say so in the chat.

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We can invite people to talk if you want to just talk out your question.

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This is a casual format.

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We’ve got Andrea from the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.

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She typed over in Q&A, but I wanted to shout her out.

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Awesome. Welcome from Chicago. Very cool.

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We’d love to hear your interest in this specifically.

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We’ll get to that. We’ll have some poll questions in a minute.

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All right. Chris, you’ve got your screen shared.

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Could you jump over to?

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Whoa. Something just went wacky with my screen there.

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Oh, that was me.

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Oh, okay.

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Because I’ve got the Zoom on my vertical screen, so it’s kind of wacky.

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But anyway, just some quick background for folks that don’t know about us

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and just how we’re, you know, our interest in this topic is, you know,

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because we work with local newspapers, weeklies, a few dailies,

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but, you know, just small community newspapers.

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We help them with their websites.

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We’ve been doing this for 27 years now.

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It’s all based on WordPress.

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And we’ll talk a little bit about, you know, open source WordPress

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and the way that things work on that system.

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But we also really want to look at everyone else’s CMS and help you,

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you know, kind of work through some of these questions

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that we’re going to bring up just in terms of how secure your content is.

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We can talk very extensively about WordPress, though.

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And then, yeah, just in general, just so you all know,

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we’ve kind of got an evolving feature set.

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So, you know, if anyone’s ever looking for help with your website,

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we’d love to talk to you.

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But we can talk about that more later.

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For the too long didn’t read.

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Let’s just kind of set the stage again.

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Like you’ve all been hearing about the A.I. opportunities.

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But, you know, there is this issue of A.I.

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scraping your content without permission.

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They’re doing this to train their models.

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They’ve been doing it for years.

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But now, you know, that they’re public and we kind of know what they’ve been doing.

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We can kind of adjust our strategy and we’ll talk about some of the technicalities behind that.

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But, you know, it’s just at a high level, they are kind of stealing this information.

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They’re not necessarily directly serving up the articles as they appeared on your site.

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But they are ingesting the knowledge and then they can be queried, you know,

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to basically tell users about your news in theory.

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So like they could get a news report based on your articles, even though it’s not,

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you know, copying the article content exactly.

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That’s the issue.

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So I guess the big question for everyone on the call is how concerned are you that A.I.

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models are scraping your content without permission?

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And what about it concerns you?

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Is it, you know, the fact that, you know, you’d be maybe losing traffic to these things,

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these A.I. engines, if people start asking them questions, what is it about it that concerns you?

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And if we could get answers in the chat box to everyone, if you could send it to everyone,

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then we could all just see, you know, what brought you to this webinar, I think is the core to this question.

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And I know folks are probably typing their answers and they can, you know,

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we can definitely come back to this throughout.

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But, you know, I think it’s just becoming a bigger, bigger question that, okay,

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so Terry says loss of revenue as it relates to my content.

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So you’re you’re concerned about, yeah, basically less traffic, less subscribers.

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If, you know, these models are somehow absorbing all the news and then able to feed it back to their users, then you’ll get less users.

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Yeah. I mean, this is kind of like the idea that we always had behind Google and the way that we’ve always looked at and kind of dealt with Google bots,

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which is to use a robots.txt file to tell it where, you know, it can get the teaser for the article in the headline,

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but we don’t give Google the whole article for the exact same reason.

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So really, if your site is safe from Google and you may not know if it is, we can talk about how to find out.

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But if it’s safe from Google bots and you’re just protecting, you’re just giving away the teaser to them,

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then that’s all that you’re given to the AI models because they have essentially the same level of access.

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Correct. Yeah. Just am I saying that right?

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Yes, I was actually going to point out I came across another concern that that I know publishers might have.

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And that is your ranking because Google recently made an update where they call it the helpful content update.

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And one of the things they changed is it’s just helpful content for people.

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It used to be helpful content by people or people.

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So what that means now is that AI generated content does not get penalized as long as it’s curated and all that,

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all that kind of stuff, and it’s not duplicated. But so you might end up with AI generated stories ranking higher than your content.

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Right. On the search engine results. Right.

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Right. Yeah, exactly. And it’s like extra competition, you know, for for the for that spot for that search results.

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Right. Yeah, that’s kind of like a really important point.

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The fact that Google doesn’t discriminate AI written content because they know it’s going to just become the norm.

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But, you know, what it boils down to is getting credit for your work and being paid for your content.

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Just like Terry’s saying here. So, yeah, let’s continue to look at the problem here.

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Let’s continue to unfold this a little bit. So true or false question for the audience.

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And just if you can drop it in the chat or the Q&A, either box is fine.

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A paywall protects my content from a scraping. That’s the statement.

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Any type of paywall, metered paywall, as long as you have some type of paywall, you’re not going to get scraped.

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What do you all think? Fortunately, I don’t have the official poll ready to go.

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So all we have to work with is the chat box. Terry, can you I think you were able to.

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OK, good. We got some feedback from Terry.

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Just want to make sure everyone’s still got audio. False. OK.

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Well, Cliff’s got a false one, too. Yes. So we’ve got some savvy customers here. Right.

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I don’t want to give it away just yet, but yeah.

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So basically, the way I said it, maybe I gave it away a little bit. The answer is false.

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Any type of paywall will not necessarily protect your content.

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You really have to. It comes down to the source code, really.

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Like the user interface is not a good predictor because even if the story, even if it’s a hard paywall without a meter,

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and the stories blurred out, it all depends on how your CMS puts together that source code for the page.

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Because we’ve come across many examples where the full article is in the source code,

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even though it’s hidden by some CSS on the actual screen.

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The full article is there, which means the bots can get it. And that’s the bottom line.

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So this is a perfect example of what Chris has shown. These are some screenshots I just took from one of our customers.

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It’s probably you probably can’t read that, but that is a picture of the source code.

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It’s a section from our WordPress CMS. It’s called All in One SEO.

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It manages what the search engines see, basically, and it gives them what they need to index the site very directly.

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So if you look, basically, this is what the user sees, right? And it’s the teaser.

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And a lot of people are familiar with this interface. This is the standard now for paywalls, right?

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To have a teaser on the front end. But if I right click and inspect the HTML for this page,

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that’s all that you got from the article. You can search this whole source code and there’s no more strings from the article.

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So you take and a good way to test this for yourself is to maybe take the last sentence of the article that’s behind the paywall

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and search for it in the source code of the page that’s behind the paywall.

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OK, so you can’t be logged in as a user because that’s what the bots are seeing.

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They’re just showing up at the site. They’re hitting the paywall. Yes, but they’re really looking at the source code.

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They don’t see the paywall like humans do. You know, they’re they’re just all about the code.

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So that’s just something to recognize. And I thought it might be interesting to go through some of our attendees sites,

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anyone that wants to have their site tested. We can do this right now.

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We can just do a quick audit and show you basically what what information you’re given to the bots that you may not be aware of.

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Cliff, I can tell you your site’s on WordPress with Our-Hometown.

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So all of our sites work the same. Sabrina, same thing for you.

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But let’s see this one here, this example on the left, we were looking at earlier.

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This is from a paper, I think, in Illinois.

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I don’t think they’re on the call with us as an attendee. They did register.

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So we kind of looked at it ahead of time. But tell us what we’re looking at here, Chris.

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This is basically two different types of paywalls. Right.

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Yeah, the one on the left is a simple overlay. And it may be a little hard to tell, but you can see there’s kind of a square behind the overlay.

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And that’s the slideshow for a sports story. And what this is telling us is even though we’re being prompted to log in and or pay,

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you can tell that the entire story has already been loaded into the user’s browser in the background,

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which basically means the paywall is hasn’t blocked anything.

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Everything’s already been delivered. And now you just have this little thing over here that that is not too hard to to get around.

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I’m going to do a quick swap here so I can demonstrate the live demo on this site.

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So, yeah, this is I’m going to open up the site in Google Chrome.

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Yeah. OK. And actually, I’ll even go back so you can see what it looks like.

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So this was just this is the Iroquois County Times Republic.

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Go to their sports rap. Actually, there was one that had more photos in here.

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Yeah, this is the one has 14 photos in it. OK.

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And you see you could even see the content pop up before the overlay did.

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Right. The contents already been there. Yeah. Yeah.

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And so I found this simple extension that turns on the reader view,

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which basically gets rid of all the extra styling and just gives you the content.

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And since it’s already been delivered to the browser with one click. Yeah.

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I buy paywall. Right. Here’s every picture and everything that was behind the paywall.

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Yeah, basically that reader, whatever that extension you you got there,

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that’s allowing you to see it like the bots do in a way.

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It’s like I can ignore all the styling because, you know, they can just put that out.

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So, yeah, that’s that’s a very good demonstration of not only how a reader could get around

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the paywall very easily, just with some HTML knowledge or knowledge of this extension,

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but definitely how all these bots are getting around it.

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So that that would contrast to the Herald, which is it’s displaying exactly what is in the code.

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There’s there’s no extra content in the, as you said, loaded into the user’s browser.

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The only on the Herald exactly what’s there.

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If you if you save it or download it or go into the source code and copy out what’s been delivered.

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It’s exactly what you see. There’s no no background download of the full content or anything.

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It’s only getting just the excerpt and then it’s prompting for the subscription or login.

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Right. Exactly. OK, so we can move on to the robot. Oh, yeah, sorry. Sure.

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Oh, yeah. No, no, no problem. Just if you have any questions on that

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or if you want us to look at the source code and just do a quick analysis on your site,

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we could also do that at the end of the webinar.

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You’ll just post a link in chat. We can we can take a peek. Exactly.

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Yeah, we’ll show you our process. It’s pretty straightforward.

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You could do it yourself, but we’re happy to help.

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So now, yeah, we jumped ahead. OK, so what would be the next thing?

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I guess the true or false. You want to do the next poll here? Yeah, why don’t we?

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Well, actually, how about this? How about we go back? Maybe go back to that news.

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This guy here, right? Right. Yeah. So we so people have been.

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Basically, OpenAI is one of the big GPT founders,

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and they recently released information on their own bot

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and also gave instructions on how you can opt out of being scraped by it by using by

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calling out the user agent, which is it’s called GPT bot, I think is what it’s called.

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And and then you can just block it.

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And so the top, I don’t know, 500 or so sites in the world,

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I think about 20 percent of them by now have already started doing that.

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Well, let’s ask the audience. That’s a great question.

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I didn’t think of that. Is anyone on the call that as far as you know,

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have a robots that text file that blocks GPT bot?

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I’d love to hear

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because this is like the next level.

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I mean, you got paywalls to think about.

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But we’ve already pointed out some of the weaknesses of certain types of paywalls.

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So the next right step in defense is the robots.txt.

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Exactly. And the news here is that, like you said,

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OpenAI has kind of agreed to respect this.

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So any site that has it on there will not be incorporated into their language model.

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Is that the bottom line?

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Their content will not be part of the training.

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Right. Exactly. Exactly.

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And to go to Cliff’s point, even if you don’t have a subscription model,

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it could be a good idea to have the robots.txt

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because then, you know, normal people will interact with your content as normal.

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But then you can also just exclude these scraper guys from either

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making too many requests and slowing your site down or utilizing your content

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in a way that you wouldn’t want.

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Yeah, I’m looking at this comment, too.

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And it looks like everyone can read that.

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So that’s good.

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Now, you’re not worried about the content being stolen,

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although it feels as if there should be standardized rules about including sources.

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Right. Yeah. That’s the Terry’s point.

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It’s kind of like, yeah, as long as I get some of that traffic back,

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you know, you know, for them to read more about the article that

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is being referenced in the chat with the bar or whatever.

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Yeah, that’s that’s the Bing’s model.

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So they are kind of leading the way there.

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So now this text is this is an example of the robots.txt,

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just the code.

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Yeah, this is a file just and it’s called robots.txt.

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It’s just a simple text file that sits in the very bottom root

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or the very top root, I guess you’d say of your website.

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You can submit it to Google and then also it’ll just live on your website.

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And any bots that are upstanding will respect these rules.

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And you can even see how granular you can get where you can allow certain

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portions of your content, i.e. categories, things like that,

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or which is what the first one is doing, saying that any user agent

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can go to see our crosswords.

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But as you see the two below that CC bot, that one’s the common crawl bot.

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Right. And that crawls everybody.

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And that was definitely has been used a lot.

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And then the GPT bot.

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And so basically disallow slash means you have no you we don’t want you

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to look at anything on the site at all.

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Same thing with the Internet Archive archiver.

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I think that’s the next one.

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And then with Twitter bot, you can you can allow certain things through.

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So what the robots text allows you to do is is kind of drive the bots

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to where you want them to have access to stuff and then keep their hands

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off of stuff that is more proprietary or shouldn’t be out there.

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You know, right. Right. Right.

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So you can keep the SEO things going and all that kind of stuff by not blocking

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stuff that is actually good for the bots to ingest.

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Right. Right. Interesting.

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OK, yeah. So I think

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there doesn’t seem to be

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much concern from the audience on this.

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But yeah, I think this is just like I said, it’s it’s similar to just blocking Google.

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I mean, really, like years ago, even a year ago,

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I would have thought that Google was going to be the first one to do this

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because they’ve been for years taking snippets from content.

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You know, like you Google the definition of a word.

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They’re no longer sending traffic to dictionary dot com or websters.

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It’s all just being answered right in the Google search results page.

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It’s just right there.

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So like that’s where I thought they were going.

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And that was kind of the logic behind blocking all but teasers.

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You know, all the all everything except what they absolutely need to,

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you know, index our content as news.

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You know, so this brings us to the true or false question.

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A robots.txt file legally protects your content from bot scraping

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and incorporation into LLMs.

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So based on this is kind of kind of hinted at this with my language a little bit.

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I may have given away a little bit.

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Right.

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Yeah, specifically referring to like the recent news with Sam Altman

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and saying that, you know, their bots will respect robots.txt.

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We’re getting faults, mostly false is which is correct.

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It’s not a legal thing yet.

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We are right on the bleeding edge of this stuff.

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This is just, I mean, them kind of saying out of respect for

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you know, content creators will do this.

24:31 –> 24:36
But this is so far from being the law, right, Chris?

24:36 –> 24:40
I mean, oh, yeah, they don’t really know what to do with a lot of this stuff.

24:40 –> 24:45
They’re they’re having Senate hearings where they’re asking tech leaders what to do.

24:45 –> 24:51
But it’s it’s a weird situation like the tech is kind of leading the way.

24:51 –> 24:57
As we can see here, they they they sort of volunteered to do this.

24:57 –> 25:04
And this is, of course, after OpenAI was founded like 2015.

25:04 –> 25:07
And we’re at GPT-4.

25:07 –> 25:10
They’ve already gone through two, three and three point five.

25:10 –> 25:14
And they said nothing.

25:14 –> 25:19
So nobody knew what I mean, these data sets were out there, but we didn’t.

25:19 –> 25:19
Nobody’s known.

25:19 –> 25:23
And now we’ve gotten all the way through GPT-4 eight years later.

25:23 –> 25:25
And now they’re like, oh, yeah, here you go.

25:25 –> 25:28
Maybe now we’ll give you a choice.

25:28 –> 25:31
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

25:31 –> 25:35
I mean, the way I look at it and, you know, this isn’t really

25:35 –> 25:39
an official.

25:39 –> 25:43
Position yet, but I mean, just as a company,

25:43 –> 25:50
we look at it like you should do everything you can to lock this stuff down,

25:50 –> 25:57
because, you know, we want to be able to create our own AI interface.

25:57 –> 26:01
We’re this is something that we’re working on at Our-Hometown, our own chatbots,

26:01 –> 26:05
because AI is just going to sweep through everything, it seems.

26:05 –> 26:09
It’s like we’ve known that it’s going to do that for years.

26:09 –> 26:11
And now that it’s here,

26:11 –> 26:16
you know, it’s kind of like the way I see it is we want to fight fire with fire.

26:16 –> 26:19
I mean, they’re they’re going to get a lot of stuff.

26:19 –> 26:22
Like they could get stuff about your town from other publications

26:22 –> 26:24
that aren’t following these standards.

26:24 –> 26:29
But if you are doing good journalism

26:29 –> 26:33
and then you have some, you know, AI assistance on the site,

26:33 –> 26:39
then people aren’t going to query just chat GPT for local news.

26:39 –> 26:40
They’ll go to your chatbot.

26:40 –> 26:45
It’s a little bit of a tangent, but like that’s that’s just kind of at a high level

26:45 –> 26:50
what I’m trying to position our publishers as.

26:50 –> 26:54
So should we talk about SEO?

26:54 –> 27:01
Yes, because this is a big question from actually the Wilson County News.

27:01 –> 27:08
We had really just on the nose question, like in very timely, because

27:08 –> 27:11
basically Google was announcing that they’re going to.

27:12 –> 27:19
I think the big announcement was they’re going to start incorporating AI into their

27:19 –> 27:24
basically content or results.

27:24 –> 27:29
But yes, the enhanced search results are going to have like some AI blurb stuff

27:29 –> 27:33
alongside a couple of links to sources.

27:33 –> 27:39
And then the normal search engine order starts below that header.

27:39 –> 27:42
Right, right.

27:42 –> 27:46
Yeah, so I guess the point I wanted to just start off with here is that

27:46 –> 27:52
Google has basically been stealing content for years from many publishers

27:52 –> 27:57
unless you have these server side paywall that we demonstrated earlier

27:57 –> 28:00
that only gives the teaser away.

28:00 –> 28:05
So they’ve been doing this, but from.

28:05 –> 28:09
From everything we can tell, they don’t seem to discriminate

28:10 –> 28:14
between full articles and those that are just providing the headline and teaser.

28:14 –> 28:21
All that they really care about is, is this URL a news article or not?

28:21 –> 28:23
You know, is the site map

28:23 –> 28:30
all filled out so I know where the header is and where the article begins?

28:30 –> 28:32
I don’t need to know what’s actually in the article.

28:32 –> 28:35
I just need to know where it starts, that kind of stuff.

28:35 –> 28:39
And those are the things that all in one SEO provides.

28:40 –> 28:44
So that’s really been our policy with Google is just to provide

28:44 –> 28:49
the minimum information so they’re not ingesting the content into their own AI

28:49 –> 28:53
and feeding it back in their own way.

28:53 –> 28:59
And the bottom line is the AI bots have the same level of access as Google bots.

28:59 –> 29:03
So if you are restricting Google bots

29:03 –> 29:07
access to full articles, then you’re already restricting the AI bots.

29:07 –> 29:12
So I think. Really, SEO,

29:12 –> 29:15
there’s a lot of other things that are more important to SEO

29:15 –> 29:17
than giving the full article.

29:17 –> 29:19
So I mean, that’s that’s the best we can tell right now.

29:19 –> 29:22
We Google is a big black box.

29:22 –> 29:26
We don’t really know how the engine works, but, you know,

29:26 –> 29:29
just based on years of following this policy,

29:29 –> 29:32
you know, our customers get great traffic from Google.

29:32 –> 29:35
I mean, there’s there’s not much.

29:36 –> 29:38
More than we can do to improve that.

29:38 –> 29:43
So I think that’s that’s basically our position.

29:43 –> 29:48
Does anyone else have any if anyone else has any like experience with this

29:48 –> 29:52
or perspective on it, I’d be interested.

29:52 –> 29:56
You know, if there’s been any if you’ve changed your settings

29:56 –> 29:59
and seen any difference in traffic from Google, but.

29:59 –> 30:05
Yeah, that’s that’s kind of like the operation

30:05 –> 30:07
the opportunity that we’ve seen.

30:07 –> 30:10
You can just sneak right in here if you follow,

30:10 –> 30:15
you know, these steps, you can kind of strike that balance

30:15 –> 30:19
you know, between protecting, you know, because you can go all the way

30:19 –> 30:22
to the extreme and just totally lock down everything.

30:22 –> 30:27
And, you know, you’ll be safe from AI, but no one will ever see your stories.

30:27 –> 30:32
So it’s it’s all just kind of like finding where to be on that continuum.

30:34 –> 30:37
I don’t know. I guess like this kind of does change the perspective

30:37 –> 30:40
a little bit on metered paywalls.

30:40 –> 30:43
I, you know, for years I’ve been saying

30:43 –> 30:46
and we’ve been saying as a company, a metered paywalls,

30:46 –> 30:49
you know, at a minimum, you should have that.

30:49 –> 30:54
This kind of suggests that maybe the hard paywall.

30:54 –> 30:59
We want to go back in that direction, which was the standard for years.

30:59 –> 31:03
Do you have any thoughts on that, Chris?

31:03 –> 31:08
Well, basically, if let’s say let’s say you allow

31:08 –> 31:14
Google to do its normal indexing and it gets the snippets and the excerpts.

31:14 –> 31:19
But if you if you put a blanket ban on the chat,

31:19 –> 31:24
GPT bot and stuff like that, as long as they’re respecting that robots.txt,

31:24 –> 31:28
it doesn’t matter about the paywall.

31:28 –> 31:32
Right. So you can so you can keep your your your your relationship

31:32 –> 31:37
to the SEO side of things and then still block at least open

31:37 –> 31:40
AI or like Twitter’s got their bots.

31:40 –> 31:43
X it is there or anybody else who’s going to have their bots out there.

31:43 –> 31:46
And the thing about let me go.

31:46 –> 31:49
I’ll go back to the the New York Times one

31:49 –> 31:54
because because of the amount of granularity you can put in there.

31:54 –> 31:58
You can kind of tailor it so that you’re getting the both best of both.

31:58 –> 32:01
You’re you’re keeping out what you don’t want.

32:01 –> 32:03
And you’re only letting in the sliver

32:03 –> 32:06
so that you get your

32:06 –> 32:13
your benefits, because I mean, I described this whole robots.txt thing.

32:13 –> 32:14
It’s kind of market driven.

32:14 –> 32:18
It’s a benefit for Google and it’s a benefit for the publishers.

32:18 –> 32:22
And what’s happened is this AI kind of thing is really upended the balance.

32:22 –> 32:26
And so right. So now we’re kind of going in and you can now

32:27 –> 32:31
kind of reimagine how to handle just the gateways

32:31 –> 32:34
and your content through the robots.txt.

32:34 –> 32:39
And then on top of that, the paywall will take care of the human aspect

32:39 –> 32:43
of things most exactly. Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

32:43 –> 32:47
Yeah, like technically speaking,

32:47 –> 32:51
with a meter paywall.

32:51 –> 32:55
A bot, a rogue bot could still get your your content, but

32:56 –> 33:00
practically speaking, they are, you know, going out there

33:00 –> 33:02
and making these statements that they’re not going to do that.

33:02 –> 33:04
So you should. So it shouldn’t.

33:04 –> 33:08
Yeah, it should leave you alone completely, regardless of your paywall.

33:08 –> 33:12
Because because actually the first thing that the bot looks at

33:12 –> 33:16
is the robots.txt. That’s the first line of defense.

33:16 –> 33:19
So any time a robot’s going in and it’s trying to get permission.

33:19 –> 33:20
That makes sense.

33:20 –> 33:23
Or is doing is doing a request from the site. Right.

33:23 –> 33:25
It immediately goes to that one first.

33:25 –> 33:29
So, yeah, that’s first line and then and then paywall for the other parts.

33:29 –> 33:35
You made a really interesting point earlier, and I want to just tease it apart

33:35 –> 33:39
a little bit. You said Google used to benefit from robots.txt.

33:39 –> 33:43
To me, I would think I don’t see how they would benefit

33:43 –> 33:45
because it’s it’s just restricting them.

33:45 –> 33:50
But how how would they benefit by having this standard?

33:50 –> 33:54
Just because they know where to look then. Yeah.

33:55 –> 33:59
It just yeah. OK, so like if you OK.

33:59 –> 34:02
Yeah, because I just think in Google’s mind, they want everything open.

34:02 –> 34:08
And why would they make it easier for people to to block stuff?

34:08 –> 34:11
And I guess it’s just the market pushing back, like you said.

34:11 –> 34:15
So yeah. Yeah. Interesting. OK. OK.

34:15 –> 34:18
Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.

34:18 –> 34:22
And it looks like we have Kristin now on with us.

34:22 –> 34:23
Thank you for joining.

34:23 –> 34:27
She was the one with the question about balancing SEO.

34:27 –> 34:32
So hopefully that was all clear.

34:32 –> 34:35
And, you know, we can definitely answer any other questions you have on it.

34:35 –> 34:40
Terry says, if a bot doesn’t honor the robots.txt boundary

34:40 –> 34:45
with a metered paywall, would they then act as a consumer

34:45 –> 34:51
where it gets free articles, enabling it to scrape a certain number of full articles?

34:52 –> 34:55
That’s actually what I thought in the beginning.

34:55 –> 35:00
But what we were just saying is actually that the robots.txt file

35:00 –> 35:04
is the first thing that they see. So they can still ignore it, though.

35:04 –> 35:06
They can still ignore it.

35:06 –> 35:10
So to get to Terry’s point, if let’s just say, let’s just call them hackers.

35:10 –> 35:12
Let’s just say you’ve got an actual hacker.

35:12 –> 35:16
Right. They can they can ignore the robots.txt.

35:16 –> 35:18
They can spoof their IP addresses.

35:18 –> 35:20
They can do all kinds of stuff.

35:20 –> 35:24
And so that’s why we have something like CloudFlare or Kismet,

35:24 –> 35:26
some of these bot monitoring things.

35:26 –> 35:29
And we weren’t we weren’t going to get into too much of that

35:29 –> 35:31
because that’s basically server side infrastructure that we use

35:31 –> 35:33
to protect all of our websites.

35:33 –> 35:38
So there’s nothing specific for the customers to deal with there.

35:38 –> 35:42
But but yeah, that I mean, if you have a nefarious actor,

35:42 –> 35:45
they can get around it. Absolutely.

35:45 –> 35:48
Right.

35:48 –> 35:51
Yeah, it’s interesting. I feel like

35:51 –> 35:57
I’m like thinking a lot like my father did back in like 90s,

35:57 –> 36:00
a ninety nine when Google was coming out, like he was

36:00 –> 36:04
he was super anti Google, even though everyone was super pro.

36:04 –> 36:07
They could only see the positives now.

36:07 –> 36:10
And he always used to talk about the hard paywall.

36:10 –> 36:12
Like he was really pushing for that.

36:12 –> 36:16
I don’t think we need to, you know, go back to that.

36:16 –> 36:20
But if you really are, you know, paranoid about stuff being stolen,

36:20 –> 36:24
if you really fear what I could do with your content,

36:24 –> 36:30
the only true lockdown is the robots.txt and a hard paywall.

36:30 –> 36:33
And another thing we could think of with

36:33 –> 36:38
with what Terry was pointing out, if you change the metered paywall

36:38 –> 36:42
so that you have to provide an email address

36:43 –> 36:47
to even get the those limited number of free articles.

36:47 –> 36:50
That’s another deterrent against the bots.

36:50 –> 36:53
So you instead of having to give up the meter paywall completely,

36:53 –> 36:57
you could add just one layer of identification

36:57 –> 37:00
that would determine the bots.

37:00 –> 37:05
Yeah, I mean, it’s just I just got to say it’s the world we live in.

37:05 –> 37:10
You know, it’s like the problem of our day, like bots.

37:11 –> 37:13
It’s crazy how this has crept up on us.

37:13 –> 37:15
It’s in the news because of Twitter.

37:15 –> 37:18
You know, he’s he’s making a popular subject.

37:18 –> 37:22
But yeah, I mean, that’s kind of where we’re at.

37:22 –> 37:25
We’re like almost like in this matrix kind of.

37:25 –> 37:28
Well, it’s not one of our earlier web webinars.

37:28 –> 37:33
We came across the factoid like over half of all of the content

37:33 –> 37:36
on the Internet is bought and generated or bought operated.

37:36 –> 37:38
Yep. Yep. Exactly.

37:38 –> 37:43
So then it comes down to just like human or bot.

37:43 –> 37:49
And so, you know, it’s just it’s like the Swiss cheese approach to security.

37:49 –> 37:54
Like no one level of security is going to protect against everything.

37:54 –> 37:58
So you’ve got to have multiple layers like stacking Swiss cheese

37:58 –> 38:01
on top of each other. So the holes don’t line up.

38:01 –> 38:05
So, yeah, you got the robots file, you have the meter paywall.

38:05 –> 38:10
And then maybe on top of that, you have a registration for the meter,

38:10 –> 38:14
which I believe the wave does a version of that

38:14 –> 38:18
rockaway of dot com if people wanted to see an example of that.

38:18 –> 38:24
But just to to what Elon is doing with X, he’s taking it one step further.

38:24 –> 38:28
So instead of having to just provide a registration, right?

38:28 –> 38:33
Right. He’s actually going to charge a small like micro fee.

38:33 –> 38:35
I mean, maybe two or three dollars.

38:35 –> 38:38
But then that adds the extra layer of a payment method

38:38 –> 38:41
to also keep the bots out.

38:41 –> 38:43
So those are those are kind of like the

38:43 –> 38:47
yeah, as you’re describing the different layers that you apply

38:47 –> 38:51
to kind of cover all the holes that maybe one one layer does it. Right.

38:51 –> 38:57
Yeah, it’s interesting how like paying money is like the one thing that

38:57 –> 39:01
AI is going to have a hard time getting around like it can’t just print money

39:01 –> 39:05
because you prevent the scale, you prevent them from the scale.

39:05 –> 39:07
Right, right.

39:07 –> 39:12
Yeah, so he’s dealing with like a whole nother level like it like that.

39:12 –> 39:16
We we are more, you know, I don’t think

39:16 –> 39:22
we need to I mean, we have, you know, obviously paying subscribers already.

39:22 –> 39:26
So like he’s kind of backing into this with this free service,

39:26 –> 39:28
which is not the situation we’re in. So

39:30 –> 39:32
this is.

39:32 –> 39:36
Basically, a summary of what publishers should do.

39:36 –> 39:39
We’ve talked about both of these things

39:39 –> 39:43
at the bottom, the technical things, but tell us a little bit about

39:43 –> 39:47
the Press Association

39:47 –> 39:51
representation there, Chris, what have you read about that?

39:51 –> 39:55
Oh, let’s see, there was.

39:55 –> 39:57
Bring this slide up.

39:57 –> 40:02
So there have been several different advocacy groups that are advocating for

40:02 –> 40:06
sorry for the redundancy there groups that are advocating for different.

40:06 –> 40:14
Slots in the market, so there’s journalists, there’s obviously

40:14 –> 40:18
we’ve all heard about the the Actors Guild, the Writers Guild

40:18 –> 40:19
and everything like that.

40:19 –> 40:22
So as far as I know, there’s not a specific

40:24 –> 40:29
push by by the by the Press Association’s.

40:29 –> 40:33
But there are other organizations that are moving in this direction.

40:33 –> 40:37
And I think maybe kind of setting a path for where

40:37 –> 40:42
Press Association’s could could go with these things. Right.

40:42 –> 40:45
And actually, I’ll come back to.

40:45 –> 40:50
Let’s see. I think we have Cindy from Illinois Press Association.

40:50 –> 40:52
So maybe this would.

40:54 –> 40:57
So like you’re saying

40:57 –> 41:02
if Press Association’s could do where that one was contact.

41:02 –> 41:08
Well, I guess it’s just like what what can be done like specifically?

41:08 –> 41:13
Well, the thing of going through the Press Association is for lobbying

41:13 –> 41:16
because it’s for the legislative side of things.

41:16 –> 41:20
So, yeah, I mean, I don’t know, Cindy, if you have any comment on that.

41:20 –> 41:22
Is that something that

41:23 –> 41:27
IPA has access to like these

41:27 –> 41:30
I don’t know, lobbying channels?

41:30 –> 41:32
It’s not really my.

41:32 –> 41:35
Well, I mean, because all these press associations were lobbying

41:35 –> 41:37
for the journalism protection, local journalism protection.

41:37 –> 41:39
Exactly. That was going around.

41:39 –> 41:42
So I’m thinking there’s going to be stuff like that going on.

41:42 –> 41:48
That just that that level of advocacy.

41:48 –> 41:50
It was another. Right.

41:50 –> 41:52
So, yeah, I mean, this.

41:53 –> 41:55
OK, I definitely want to talk about

41:55 –> 42:00
just more in that direction, but.

42:00 –> 42:05
And here’s here’s a group of media.

42:05 –> 42:08
This is a group of media associations. Right.

42:08 –> 42:09
And they release.

42:09 –> 42:14
This is just an outline I pulled, but they released these ethical principles.

42:14 –> 42:20
So this is kind of where I think the publishers going into the press associations.

42:20 –> 42:23
This is kind of the real deal.

42:23 –> 42:27
So they’re negotiating for compensation when your content is used.

42:27 –> 42:30
Regulations and corporate responsibility,

42:30 –> 42:35
trustworthiness, actually having transparency with the developers.

42:35 –> 42:38
So we know what’s in the training data

42:38 –> 42:42
and actually use high quality data instead of I don’t know.

42:42 –> 42:47
I mean, should we really be scraping Reddit for quality AI data?

42:47 –> 42:49
I’m not sure. Right.

42:49 –> 42:53
And then also be able to monitor them for how well they’re they’re behaving.

42:53 –> 42:55
You know, right. Right.

42:55 –> 42:57
So Cindy says our board is looking into this

42:57 –> 42:59
and trying to wrap their heads around it.

42:59 –> 43:03
That’s pretty much what we’re doing. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah.

43:03 –> 43:09
So I mean, I just got to read some of Andrea’s comment.

43:09 –> 43:13
Yeah. Yeah. Take a second on that one. Yeah. This is fantastic.

43:13 –> 43:15
This like sets it up because.

43:15 –> 43:18
Well, let me just read it just in case everyone hasn’t seen it.

43:18 –> 43:24
The nefarious actor thing interests me because for a lot of local news orgs,

43:24 –> 43:26
the competition isn’t necessarily global.

43:26 –> 43:30
There are tools that are not necessarily writing large, but writing small.

43:30 –> 43:35
They would allow local competitors, say a bad actor,

43:35 –> 43:38
crops up to scrape and resell your content. Exactly.

43:38 –> 43:43
Like imagine it could be just even like a Twitter handle.

43:43 –> 43:45
You know, they just start.

43:45 –> 43:47
It doesn’t have to be a website. It could be a newsletter.

43:47 –> 43:51
They start just scraping your articles, rewriting it.

43:51 –> 43:54
And then, you know, they say, hey, this is enough.

43:54 –> 43:56
You know, this is fresh copy. It’s the same story.

43:56 –> 43:59
Start to see that trending higher in search results.

43:59 –> 44:03
And you’re really like, what is going on? Right. Right. So.

44:03 –> 44:08
Yeah. So she goes on to say, you know, there are now ways

44:08 –> 44:14
it would be very easy for bad actors to build ways to drain other pubs.

44:14 –> 44:16
Yeah, that’s the I think another good point.

44:16 –> 44:19
It’s just a lot easier. Like this was always possible.

44:19 –> 44:23
I mean, I could buy a subscription to the Salt Lake Tribune

44:23 –> 44:27
and turn it into a newsletter, but that would be like a full time job.

44:27 –> 44:32
So yeah, the fact that you can just plug in an article and say rewrite it

44:32 –> 44:34
in your own words makes it easier.

44:34 –> 44:38
So it’s like Cliff’s actually got an example of one of those.

44:38 –> 44:43
Yeah. Yeah. It’s not ultra paranoid, says Cliff. I agree.

44:43 –> 44:46
I feel like we’ve seen this for years.

44:46 –> 44:48
There’s a site that does this around Columbus, Ohio,

44:48 –> 44:50
and presumably makes money off advertising.

44:50 –> 44:53
So Newsbreak. Yeah.

44:53 –> 44:58
Newsbreak has been doing this for a while.

44:58 –> 45:01
They. Yeah, we see a lot of

45:01 –> 45:07
issues with Newsbreak, a lot of tickets coming in related to that.

45:07 –> 45:10
How is content protected now in InDesign?

45:10 –> 45:13
Well, we can talk about InDesign, actually. I want to get to that.

45:14 –> 45:18
So let’s talk about now, like we’ve talked about the problem

45:18 –> 45:22
and some some things you can do to mitigate and protect yourself.

45:22 –> 45:26
But like the real solution are these ethical principles

45:26 –> 45:29
like standards in the industry.

45:29 –> 45:34
Maybe it can be led by Cindy and IPA and, you know, other press associations.

45:34 –> 45:39
But like let’s talk now, Chris, you have some great slides about like

45:39 –> 45:43
some of the solutions that are out there already with Adobe

45:43 –> 45:47
and let’s let’s talk about that. OK, perfect.

45:47 –> 45:51
So this is this is specifically for images.

45:51 –> 45:56
But as the transparency opens up and

45:56 –> 46:01
and some of these guidelines and things may be regulated into action,

46:01 –> 46:05
more people will follow along in this. But so

46:05 –> 46:10
Adobe has now released their AI image generation product,

46:10 –> 46:12
Firefly, into commercial release.

46:13 –> 46:16
And that means you can use them for anything.

46:16 –> 46:19
And one of the things that they were

46:19 –> 46:24
emphasizing through the entire beta period was that the image generation

46:24 –> 46:31
model was only trained on their pre-existing Adobe stock collection

46:31 –> 46:34
and then some other licensed stock collections.

46:34 –> 46:40
So you have no worry about about any kind of litigation using these tools.

46:40 –> 46:45
The fun part, though, is when you think, oh, so what about all those artists

46:45 –> 46:50
who submitted their their photographs and illustrations to stock in the first place?

46:50 –> 46:52
Then Adobe scrapes that and makes this new tool.

46:52 –> 46:56
Well, what Adobe is going to do is pay them

46:56 –> 47:01
because they’ve been keeping track of every piece of art that was submitted

47:01 –> 47:03
and then used to train Firefly.

47:03 –> 47:08
And they’re going to do a yearly dispersion of funds.

47:09 –> 47:10
And I even looked at it.

47:10 –> 47:15
I don’t have the stats right with me, but it’s like a few cents per however many

47:15 –> 47:17
hundred licensees or whatever.

47:17 –> 47:20
So it’s not huge, but it’s basically the same

47:20 –> 47:25
royalty share that was happening with the original stock program.

47:25 –> 47:30
But now that AI has come into it, if your AI, if your artist

47:30 –> 47:32
being used to train the AI, you also get paid for that.

47:32 –> 47:39
And then what’s even more fun is anyone who generates art

47:39 –> 47:44
with Firefly and then goes on to create something with it using

47:44 –> 47:49
further generative tools can then as long as it meets and they’ve

47:49 –> 47:53
published a new set of guidelines for AI submissions.

47:53 –> 47:57
But now artists can then submit that new

47:57 –> 48:03
AI generated derivative work and get it posted to Adobe Stock

48:03 –> 48:05
and start getting royalties off.

48:05 –> 48:08
So they’re basically saying, you create the content.

48:08 –> 48:11
We trained our model on your contents.

48:11 –> 48:12
We’re going to pay you for that.

48:12 –> 48:15
Now, if you make some something with that model.

48:15 –> 48:21
And then add your artistry to it, we’re going to accept that back again

48:21 –> 48:22
and keep the circle running.

48:22 –> 48:30
Yeah, so I thought to put this in terms for newspapers, it would seem like

48:30 –> 48:35
a piece of artwork would basically be a piece of news content.

48:36 –> 48:41
Now, there’s definitely a huge technical difference in how you watermark

48:41 –> 48:46
and find provenance for these types of things.

48:46 –> 48:51
So but as they get that, but they can still have a record in the database

48:51 –> 48:57
that saying that this URL was used to train this data from this data

48:57 –> 48:58
set was used to train this model.

48:58 –> 49:01
And if they keep track of that, there’s absolutely no reason.

49:01 –> 49:03
And this goes to the transparency thing.

49:03 –> 49:06
There’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t keep track of that.

49:06 –> 49:10
And actually compensate people and have some kind of a negotiated thing.

49:10 –> 49:15
Kind of I mentioned ASCAP doing performance royalties for songwriters.

49:15 –> 49:21
It would be something along those lines so that you wouldn’t necessarily want

49:21 –> 49:25
to block everything once they start putting a system in place where they’re

49:25 –> 49:28
not just taking your stuff and doing whatever they want with it

49:28 –> 49:29
without you having any say.

49:29 –> 49:33
So I’m kind of seeing a lot of this protection as just.

49:34 –> 49:38
We need to put something in place now because it’s going to be a while

49:38 –> 49:42
for the Senate and all the meetings and the hearings and all these kind of things

49:42 –> 49:47
to develop actual legislation that will then come back and give us more

49:47 –> 49:51
insight into how we need to to relate to these tools.

49:51 –> 49:52
And maybe it’ll be easier.

49:52 –> 49:55
So if you don’t block this or maybe there’s something that goes in the robots

49:55 –> 49:59
text, it gives you a little signature that then goes in and that

50:00 –> 50:04
comes back around so you can get credited and perhaps paid for your content.

50:04 –> 50:07
So I’m excited about this.

50:07 –> 50:11
This just they just started rolling this out over the past two weeks.

50:11 –> 50:13
Right. Yeah.

50:13 –> 50:17
I mean, if anyone has experience using Firefly,

50:17 –> 50:23
some of the new Adobe AI products, I’d love to hear about your experience there.

50:23 –> 50:27
But so this this is kind of, I guess,

50:27 –> 50:32
what we’re talking about earlier, just like, well, as you said, locking it down.

50:32 –> 50:36
And I mean, anyone can can build their own

50:36 –> 50:40
AI now like there’s these, you know, adults out there.

50:40 –> 50:42
So that’s what Adobe’s done.

50:42 –> 50:44
They’ve taken.

50:44 –> 50:49
They’re creating a proprietary AI, kind of like what we’ve done with WordPress.

50:49 –> 50:52
It’s open source WordPress, but we’ve specialized it for newspapers.

50:54 –> 50:58
And then there’s this walled garden kind of environment

50:58 –> 51:00
where everything lives in there.

51:00 –> 51:06
The payments are the circular analogy that you kind of made there was good.

51:06 –> 51:08
Like it really is like a.

51:08 –> 51:12
So it’s going to get it’s going to like just accelerate creativity to get.

51:12 –> 51:14
I mean, so they do have some guidelines.

51:14 –> 51:16
I’ll go across a couple.

51:16 –> 51:19
You can’t submit anything that’s a caricature of a real person.

51:19 –> 51:22
You’re not supposed to do stuff with real places.

51:22 –> 51:25
It needs to be imaginary kind of thing.

51:25 –> 51:29
So, yeah, you can’t do the Trump in a Superman costume or something.

51:29 –> 51:31
They’re that’s not going to fly.

51:31 –> 51:34
So it has to be more more traditional style stock stuff.

51:34 –> 51:36
Like if you. Yeah.

51:36 –> 51:39
Like if you just kind of built some railroad going through a forest

51:39 –> 51:42
or something like that and it looks really cool with nice lighting.

51:42 –> 51:45
That would be a good a good candidate for submission.

51:45 –> 51:51
I do want to address a couple of points that we got on that got us started on Adobe.

51:51 –> 51:56
And that is how is Adobe protecting or allowing you to to sign your content?

51:56 –> 52:00
Right. And I don’t have a slide for this, but I’ll give you just a quick breakdown.

52:00 –> 52:06
Any image is generated by Firefly has something embedded called content credentials.

52:06 –> 52:11
And it’s using blockchain technology so that it can’t be tampered with.

52:11 –> 52:16
And it’s and it’s saved into a verification cloud partnership

52:16 –> 52:19
that they’ve they’ve built with some other

52:20 –> 52:25
companies, even like camera companies, Canon and Leica and stuff.

52:25 –> 52:29
They’re going to start building these these provenance blockchain based things

52:29 –> 52:33
so that these content credentials will start from the camera

52:33 –> 52:37
and end at your export of the photo.

52:37 –> 52:41
And your name is on it.

52:41 –> 52:44
And basically, let’s let’s go back to the idea.

52:44 –> 52:47
So if you get something from Adobe Firefly, it’s going to say

52:47 –> 52:49
Adobe Firefly generated this.

52:49 –> 52:53
Now you open it up on Photoshop, you use all the tools, even the generative ones,

52:53 –> 52:56
make some cool things, add some ponies, do whatever sky replacement,

52:56 –> 52:58
all that kind of stuff.

52:58 –> 53:03
Adobe will keep track of the high level changes that you’re making.

53:03 –> 53:06
It’ll say, oh, yeah, you generated some new stuff or you brought in another file

53:06 –> 53:11
to composite and all of that will be saved in this content credentials list

53:11 –> 53:15
so that then when you export that that credentials is now

53:15 –> 53:20
permanently assigned to that image and you can use image look up

53:20 –> 53:23
all kinds of different things.

53:23 –> 53:26
But if you use the verify tool that Adobe puts out there,

53:26 –> 53:30
you can actually even open up one of these things with the content credentials

53:30 –> 53:32
and you can actually see the different versions

53:32 –> 53:38
of what what was created and what was added and go back and see the original one

53:38 –> 53:42
that they got from Firefly versus what they did to resubmit it to stock.

53:43 –> 53:46
And yes, so that was speaking of images.

53:46 –> 53:50
But to get back to it, Adobe is going to be rolling out

53:50 –> 53:56
content credentials for, I believe, all of their creation apps.

53:56 –> 54:00
So it’s I think the next one is going to be video.

54:00 –> 54:03
But I would I would definitely think that

54:03 –> 54:06
that InDesign would be a candidate.

54:06 –> 54:10
But the thing is with InDesign is remember, if you’re if you’re talking about InDesign,

54:10 –> 54:13
are you what are you actually trying to protect?

54:14 –> 54:16
If you’re trying to protect the photography that’s in there,

54:16 –> 54:19
that’s taking care of content credentials.

54:19 –> 54:22
If it’s if it’s the PDF that gets exported,

54:22 –> 54:25
I’m hoping that they’ll do something with content credentials there

54:25 –> 54:30
because, you know, there’s already so much metadata in a PDF anyway.

54:30 –> 54:34
But I’m just not sure how the technology is going to work on that yet.

54:34 –> 54:37
I think it’s a little easier for images and they’re still going to be working

54:37 –> 54:39
on the other ones, but yeah.

54:39 –> 54:42
Interesting. Yeah.

54:42 –> 54:48
I mean, there’s we’ve got a couple other examples in here, but

54:48 –> 54:50
I mean, we’re coming up on an hour.

54:50 –> 54:54
So I just want to make sure that we have all our questions answered.

54:54 –> 55:00
And if anyone wants to see, you know, have us take a look at the source code

55:00 –> 55:04
to your website and just make sure that the paywall isn’t given away

55:04 –> 55:08
more than you think to the bots, we can definitely stick around.

55:08 –> 55:12
Just drop us a message in the chat that you’d like to do that.

55:13 –> 55:16
But I mean, there was was there anything else, Chris,

55:16 –> 55:19
that you wanted to show from the slides or?

55:19 –> 55:24
Well, let me bring let me bring one up because this this kind of came up

55:24 –> 55:30
because a lot of publishers, I think, are nervous about using AI

55:30 –> 55:35
as part of their creative process because they’re worried about copyright

55:35 –> 55:37
and things like that.

55:37 –> 55:42
So Microsoft, in addition, because actually Microsoft had their meeting

55:42 –> 55:46
this morning, and so the next version of Windows 11 is going to have their

55:46 –> 55:49
copilot sitting right there in the taskbar.

55:49 –> 55:55
So before they release that, they released this announcement saying that any use

55:55 –> 55:58
any commercial usage you you put their copilot

55:58 –> 56:01
models to the AI stuff and anything’s generated.

56:01 –> 56:05
If anybody comes after you for copyright,

56:06 –> 56:09
they’ll take care of the they’ll take care of you.

56:09 –> 56:12
And that’s that’s a crazy.

56:12 –> 56:15
It’s so odd. Yeah, it’s really weird.

56:15 –> 56:19
Yeah. So again, it’s just kind of like

56:19 –> 56:23
the tech companies leading the way and just like

56:23 –> 56:29
given, I don’t know, being proactive, I guess you could say.

56:29 –> 56:31
But it’s like

56:32 –> 56:36
they’re obviously benefiting so much from this

56:36 –> 56:40
to be able to make that claim.

56:40 –> 56:43
And I hadn’t really brought in any of the government stuff,

56:43 –> 56:45
but I did put this slide together.

56:45 –> 56:47
This is just from last week.

56:47 –> 56:51
So Schumer was the one that was leading the the national security

56:51 –> 56:56
Senate hearing, which is why it was closed, the one that had Elon and Zuck

56:56 –> 56:58
and Sam and all those guys.

56:58 –> 57:01
But he did a presentation the week before.

57:01 –> 57:04
And you can see there’s some very similar

57:04 –> 57:09
guidelines to what the the news association plan looks like.

57:09 –> 57:13
They have a little bit more on national security in there, but,

57:13 –> 57:17
you know, they’re really concerned from just it’s top down.

57:17 –> 57:20
It’s governmental level stuff.

57:20 –> 57:23
But that’s why from the bottom up, the grassroots,

57:23 –> 57:26
the press associations and stuff, you know, if they’re just going to be

57:26 –> 57:30
focused on on on AI powered drones and stuff,

57:30 –> 57:32
we want to make sure that they are aware of us

57:32 –> 57:36
and how AI is going to be affecting the publishing industry as well.

57:36 –> 57:39
So while they’re they’re making all these discussions and,

57:39 –> 57:42
you know, accountability, all these kind of things,

57:42 –> 57:46
I think it’s important that we we also.

57:46 –> 57:50
And this is this is where doing going through the copyright office.

57:50 –> 57:52
That was the other one I wanted to show. Where is that?

57:52 –> 57:57
Yeah, here it is. So this this just started this

57:57 –> 57:59
this month where this is another place where

58:00 –> 58:03
people who are interested and actually get their voices heard.

58:03 –> 58:08
This is going to be open until October 18th.

58:08 –> 58:11
It looks like no, I’m sorry, November 15th.

58:11 –> 58:16
And so you can there’ll be submitting basically what your concerns are

58:16 –> 58:19
with regards to AI and copyright.

58:19 –> 58:23
I mean, we haven’t talked about it too much, but I will touch on it very briefly

58:23 –> 58:26
is that if you use AI to generate content.

58:27 –> 58:31
Right. And you don’t do all that much with it.

58:31 –> 58:35
Then you can’t copyright it.

58:35 –> 58:38
Or the only thing you can copyright is whatever you actually did.

58:38 –> 58:42
Like if you had it write a bunch of poems and you collated the poems into a book,

58:42 –> 58:47
you could copyright the order of the poems, but not the content of the poem.

58:47 –> 58:49
You know what I mean? Right.

58:49 –> 58:52
It’s the same thing with the comic book, where someone wrote

58:52 –> 58:55
that wrote the text for the comic book, but all the images were made

58:55 –> 58:59
by an image generator can’t copyright any of the images,

58:59 –> 59:02
but you can copyright the storyline and the layout of the images in the book.

59:02 –> 59:07
So that’s just kind of in its very they’re just starting to do this.

59:07 –> 59:11
So that’s why they’ve opened this up to to public comment

59:11 –> 59:17
for artists, authors, news publishers, journalists to to to put in their

59:17 –> 59:20
their concerns. Right. Right.

59:20 –> 59:24
Yeah. If you do you have a link to that page handy

59:24 –> 59:28
or maybe we could send it out after in the follow up email also.

59:28 –> 59:31
I’ll type it into chat real quick.

59:31 –> 59:33
Just in the. Yeah, well, we’ll get to you.

59:33 –> 59:39
But I want to address Andrea’s check here.

59:39 –> 59:42
I really appreciate your questions and comments, Andrea.

59:42 –> 59:46
So we actually looked at your site already

59:46 –> 59:49
because we were expecting you.

59:49 –> 59:53
And it looks like it is.

59:53 –> 59:57
As I recall, Chris, they are actually locked down

59:57 –> 01:00:01
in terms of the source code.

01:00:01 –> 01:00:05
I think you you did a quick check on Chicago Daily Lob Bulletin.

01:00:05 –> 01:00:10
Could you maybe just bring up their site really quick

01:00:10 –> 01:00:14
and we’ll just show how we we test this?

01:00:14 –> 01:00:18
Yeah, let me do a reshare on that after I get it loaded.

01:00:18 –> 01:00:20
Yeah, no problem.

01:00:21 –> 01:00:24
I’m almost going to show you a little bit about the technical side

01:00:24 –> 01:00:26
because I’m going to have Chrome here.

01:00:26 –> 01:00:28
Yeah, and take a look.

01:00:28 –> 01:00:30
We’ll dig a little bit more in here.

01:00:30 –> 01:00:33
This would also probably be like a really good

01:00:33 –> 01:00:37
blog post, just like the steps to checking.

01:00:37 –> 01:00:41
All right. So let’s see what we’ve got.

01:00:41 –> 01:00:43
Oh, my gosh, we have we have we have a paywall.

01:00:43 –> 01:00:45
OK, we definitely have a paywall.

01:00:45 –> 01:00:47
Let’s try the reader thing.

01:00:47 –> 01:00:50
Right. OK, so this is good.

01:00:50 –> 01:00:52
The reader only get the excerpt.

01:00:52 –> 01:00:57
Right. So now let’s take a look.

01:00:57 –> 01:01:00
At this.

01:01:00 –> 01:01:09
I’m curious, Andrea, what is the CMS that your site’s built on?

01:01:09 –> 01:01:12
I couldn’t tell.

01:01:12 –> 01:01:14
Just looking at it.

01:01:14 –> 01:01:18
Briefly, before we jumped on.

01:01:18 –> 01:01:22
Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure this is this is not

01:01:22 –> 01:01:26
that one. No, that’s a picture.

01:01:26 –> 01:01:30
I know. I think actually let me take it out of reader mode.

01:01:30 –> 01:01:33
So in reader mode. No. Yeah, I don’t see it.

01:01:33 –> 01:01:36
I do not see it.

01:01:36 –> 01:01:40
G.N. for miles 33.

01:01:40 –> 01:01:42
OK, I haven’t heard of that.

01:01:42 –> 01:01:43
I’ll have to look into them. Thank you. Wow.

01:01:43 –> 01:01:45
G.N.

01:01:47 –> 01:01:49
Yeah, because I’m basically OK.

01:01:49 –> 01:01:51
So here here we go. Here’s the HTML.

01:01:51 –> 01:01:55
It’s in there. OK, so what I’m going to do,

01:01:55 –> 01:01:58
this is this will be a little silly, but bear with me for just a moment.

01:01:58 –> 01:02:02
I’m going to I’m going to basically create a local copy of the HTML

01:02:02 –> 01:02:04
that I just quote unquote scraped.

01:02:04 –> 01:02:08
Right from your website.

01:02:08 –> 01:02:11
Right. You’re pretending you’re the bot. Yeah.

01:02:11 –> 01:02:14
Yep. OK. OK.

01:02:14 –> 01:02:20
Chicago to OK.

01:02:20 –> 01:02:24
Now I’m going to try to find that.

01:02:24 –> 01:02:27
OK, you get to go to.

01:02:27 –> 01:02:32
So I’m going to I’m now I’m going to reopen that same HTML file in Chrome again.

01:02:32 –> 01:02:35
Right. And this is what it looks like.

01:02:35 –> 01:02:42
Right. So as you see that all you get is is the excerpt.

01:02:43 –> 01:02:45
So, yeah, this is this is nice and solid.

01:02:45 –> 01:02:47
This is the way you want it. Right. That’s a.

01:02:47 –> 01:02:50
So that would be like a server side paywall.

01:02:50 –> 01:02:54
That’s that’s essentially what we demoed on our Our-Hometowns, WordPress sites.

01:02:54 –> 01:02:57
It’s it’s been our standard for years.

01:02:57 –> 01:03:00
You know, like like I said, many people wanted to just kind of give

01:03:00 –> 01:03:01
everything away to Google.

01:03:01 –> 01:03:06
It’s like anything to get me traffic, but they really don’t need the full story.

01:03:06 –> 01:03:10
So it looks like your CMS provider set it up right.

01:03:10 –> 01:03:13
So that’s good for you.

01:03:13 –> 01:03:18
Let me think here.

01:03:18 –> 01:03:23
I don’t think we’re just about an hour and I usually like to kind of wrap it up now,

01:03:23 –> 01:03:26
unless there’s any other questions.

01:03:26 –> 01:03:27
I think we showed everything.

01:03:27 –> 01:03:30
I know, Chris, you prepared a lot of stuff,

01:03:30 –> 01:03:33
but did we hit all the the main points that you wanted to?

01:03:33 –> 01:03:37
Yeah, I mean, I had some stuff, more, you know, stuff from the tech guys

01:03:37 –> 01:03:40
that are running things and comments, but it’s nothing to it’s all kind

01:03:40 –> 01:03:43
of fairly democratic language.

01:03:43 –> 01:03:44
It’s not all that right.

01:03:44 –> 01:03:45
I’ll take or anything.

01:03:45 –> 01:03:48
You know, the high. Oh, I got you.

01:03:48 –> 01:03:48
Yeah. Yeah.

01:03:48 –> 01:03:54
We’ll probably want to do a follow up on this because it’s, you know, it’s an evolving thing.

01:03:54 –> 01:03:58
Yeah. I’ve got a there’s just a quick couple of comments from Elon right after the Senate meeting

01:03:58 –> 01:04:01
and and Bill did a little thing there as well.

01:04:01 –> 01:04:05
But that’s not the most exciting thing there.

01:04:05 –> 01:04:07
Oh, is it? Yeah. Yeah. No problem.

01:04:07 –> 01:04:10
Well, what we’ll do is we’ll send out the whole presentation.

01:04:10 –> 01:04:16
It’s got a lot more detail on like this, you know, government level stuff that’s happening.

01:04:16 –> 01:04:21
I really wanted to, you know, focus the time that we had together today on like

01:04:21 –> 01:04:26
just the stuff you can look at with your own site, like really close to home.

01:04:26 –> 01:04:29
But yeah, there’s there’s a lot going on.

01:04:29 –> 01:04:33
And, you know, we’re trying to keep our finger on the pulse and keep you informed

01:04:33 –> 01:04:36
on how it impacts newspapers as best we can.

01:04:36 –> 01:04:38
So we’ll continue doing that.

01:04:38 –> 01:04:40
Stay tuned.

01:04:40 –> 01:04:43
And for more, you know, webinars in the future.

01:04:43 –> 01:04:46
Cliff has a comment here.

01:04:46 –> 01:04:50
No questions. Really appreciate Our-Hometown offering these webinars

01:04:50 –> 01:04:54
for some great insight into issues in our industry.

01:04:54 –> 01:04:58
Very helpful, especially for small shops as mine.

01:04:58 –> 01:05:00
I appreciate that, Cliff, very much.

01:05:00 –> 01:05:03
Exactly my goal.

01:05:03 –> 01:05:07
So thank you and Andrea, thank you.

01:05:07 –> 01:05:11
Very, very kind for you to join us and give us your time.

01:05:11 –> 01:05:15
So it’s nice talking with you all on the chat.

01:05:15 –> 01:05:17
And yeah, just a real quick shout out.

01:05:17 –> 01:05:20
If anyone, Chris, has got our wrap up slide here.

01:05:20 –> 01:05:26
Anyone not with us yet and you want to see what your newspaper could look like on

01:05:26 –> 01:05:30
WordPress, just scan that app or go to our website.

01:05:31 –> 01:05:34
You know, you can fill out a contact us form, give us a call.

01:05:34 –> 01:05:40
What we usually like to do is have you send us a copy of your print PDF

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and we’ll just turn it into a website, which is what we basically do

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every week for all of our customers, for the majority of our customers,

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is the full service management of the site.

01:05:51 –> 01:05:56
So just a quick plug for Our-Hometown there and the rapid prototyping.

01:05:56 –> 01:06:00
But I think that’s all our content for today.

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So again, we’ll follow up with an email and please share the recording

01:06:05 –> 01:06:06
with anyone that you’d like.

01:06:06 –> 01:06:12
It’s just going to be open on YouTube and Christopher, thank you so much, sir.

01:06:12 –> 01:06:13
A great job.

01:06:13 –> 01:06:13
Thank you, Matt.

01:06:13 –> 01:06:16
Appreciate your expertise as always.

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And Terry, thank you for jumping on and everyone appreciate your time.

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We’ll hopefully see you next time.