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News leaders warn AI crawling and summaries are stripping value from Oregon journalism
Summary
Representatives from The Oregonian, The Bend Bulletin and the Center for Journalism and Liberty told lawmakers AI systems and platform crawlers extract reporting at scale, reduce click-throughs, and threaten the business model for local journalism; witnesses urged transparency, compensation frameworks and possible legislation (one attendee cited SB1580).
Three presenters told the Joint Committee on Information Management and Technology on Feb. 13 that AI systems and platform crawling pose an urgent threat to Oregons local news ecosystem.
John Maher, regional president for Advance Local (publisher of The Oregonian), said platforms increasingly summarize news and present answers without sending readers back to original reporting. "AI systems crawl our journalism at a massive scale. They summarize it directly for users, and the reader gets the answer without ever visiting our site," Maher said. He described the imbalance as a "crawl-to-click" problem that is…
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