USA Today Co. told shareholders on 6 August that its investment in Palantir's data platform is helping it monetise its audience. The claim sits in the second-quarter earnings release, lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as an exhibit to an 8-K, the form a US-listed company files to report an event between quarterly reports1.
USA Today Co. is the renamed Gannett, the group that publishes USA Today alongside several hundred American local titles. Palantir sells data-integration software to governments and to companies. Michael Reed, chairman and chief executive, put the two together in the release: "Combined with investments in technologies like Palantir, these initiatives are helping us better understand and monetize our audience while building a more diversified and resilient business." The initiatives he lists are social, video and newsletter reach, plus what the release calls stronger first-party audience capabilities. First-party means data a publisher collects from its own readers rather than buys in.
That capability is the one every publisher board is now trying to buy, because search referrals no longer deliver the anonymous scale they once did. Fox Corporation agreed in June to acquire Roku for roughly $22bn, which would hand it device-level viewing behaviour from more than 100 million households. USA Today Co. is buying the same category of asset as a service instead, cheaper and faster, and with the supplier's name attached to its newsrooms.
Palantir brought a cost the earnings release does not price. Four days after the release, journalists represented by The NewsGuild-CWA published a demand that the company end the relationship, on the grounds that Palantir's software has been used, in the union's words, to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns. A disclosure written for investors became a labour dispute inside the same week.
