A federal copyright lawsuit between The New York Times and OpenAI could harm local journalism more than it helps, according to a commentary published recently by the R Street Institute. The Department of Justice has urged the court to reject the Times' claim that training AI models on copyrighted material constitutes infringement, and the report argues that the lawsuit's outcome could determine whether small newsrooms gain or lose access to affordable AI tools they're already using.
The data paints a stark picture of America's local news crisis. There are now 212 U.S. counties with no locally based news source and another 1,525 counties with only a single outlet, leaving roughly one in seven Americans with limited or no access to local news coverage. Meanwhile, The New York Times counts nearly 13 million subscribers and competes directly with local outlets for the single news subscription most people will ever buy. The Lenfest Institute for Journalism currently runs a $10 million program deploying AI fellows to local newsrooms to build tools for reporting, audience growth, and revenue generation.
The government's statement of interest warns that licensing fees "would disproportionately benefit legacy media outlets due to the sheer volume of their written publications," functioning primarily as subsidies for old mainstream media companies. The report emphasizes that a licensing mandate would raise costs and narrow capabilities of AI tools that local newsrooms depend on, while the destruction remedy the Times seeks would eliminate systems already in use. According to the commentary, philanthropic initiatives devoted to revitalizing local news have made grants to equip journalists with AI-powered public records tools and to build newsroom chatbots that answer reader questions from an outlet's own archive, complete with citations and links back to full articles.
The report explains that AI tools help level the playing field between mainstream and independent publishers by lowering the cost of covering school board meetings or filing records requests—exactly what understaffed newsrooms need. Entry barriers built on licensing fees would direct revenue only to the largest media firms, leaving out the small and disappearing local outlets that make up the bulk of America's journalism crisis. Newsrooms that were never party to this litigation would absorb costs from both directions: losing tools they use today without gaining licensing income tomorrow. These tools lower operational expenses for two-person newsrooms trying to serve communities that larger outlets have abandoned.
The report concludes that the measure of any legal rule emerging from this case is its effect on the smallest newsroom in America, not the largest. A victory for the country's largest newsroom isn't automatically a victory for all of journalism, and the plaintiff's theory of the case has remarkably little to offer the outlets it claims to protect.