Center for Journalism & Liberty

The Center for Journalism & Liberty (CJL) is a US media policy organisation housed within the Open Markets Institute that in April 2026 published "Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths: Mapping the AI Content Licensing Market", the most comprehensive independent audit of AI publisher-licensing deal terms to date. The report mapped known deal values: News Corp's OpenAI arrangement at approximately $250 million over five years, DotDash Meredith at $16 million per year, Thomson Reuters at $33 million year-to-date in AI licensing revenue, and Amazon paying The New York Times roughly $20 million annually. These figures became the reference point against which News Corp's $1.5 billion anticipated Anthropic settlement was measured when Thomson disclosed the figure on 8 May 2026.

The Center for Journalism & Liberty was established to advocate for independent journalism and press freedom in the context of platform dominance. It has produced a series of reports examining how large technology platforms affect news publishers' business models, distribution reach and editorial independence. "Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths" argued that the AI content-licensing market was replicating the structural asymmetry of the prior search and social platform era, with AI companies acting as a new class of gatekeeper. The report's title is a reference to antitrust scholarship on platform choke-points.

CJL's significance in this briefing cycle is methodological: it assembled deal terms that publishers agreed under non-disclosure provisions, providing the first market-wide comparison of AI licensing values. The $1.5 billion Anthropic figure disclosed by News Corp sits six times above the OpenAI deal CJL had mapped — a ratio that will be cited in every subsequent policy discussion about whether AI licensing income can structurally offset the advertising revenue losses that are driving publisher consolidation.