The BBC will face a formal review of its funding model later this year, The Times reports. Advertising and subscriptions will be considered among the alternatives to the current mechanism, which relies primarily on the licence fee, a de-facto tax on British citizens.

“The review will assess the advantages and disadvantages of each model and present advice to ministers in the autumn of next year”, The Times’ Steven Swinford and Alex Farber report.

Over the past years there have been increasing concerns that the BBC’s current funding model is unsustainable as fewer and fewer Britons are willing to pay the licence fee and as competition from private media companies have grown. The BBC’s royal charter, which lays out its funding mechanism, is up for renewal in 2027.

Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced a $5 million support fund for local news publishers in the United States in partnership with the American Journalism Project. The money will be spent on studying the application of AI in local news and to support development and deployment of AI tools in around ten news organisations.

Just last week, Open AI signed a deal with the Associated Press to licence its archive of text news stories to train the company’s large language models that power its technology.

The news comes as the rise in generative AI threatens to further upend digital news publishers’ funding model, which today relies heavily on search traffic. Leading media companies have been reported in recent months to actively explore deals with AI firms that could help them capture some of the financial upside of AI tools’ fast rise.

Vox Media is dropping Chorus, a proprietary content management system (CMS) the company developed and once licenced to other publishers. The publisher will switch to using WordPress VIP.

As Axios’ Sara Fischer and Kerry Flynn, who first broke this story, note, “CMS licensing was once seen as a lucrative opportunity for publishers looking to grow revenue beyond ad dollars. But WordPress’ continued dominance in the space has made it harder to compete.”

Vox Media now prioritises monetising its own audience engagement through advertising and subscriptions and the area of its core competency, Fischer and Flynn report. Still, the company will continue to support its other tech platforms like advertising product Concert and commenting platform Coral.

BBC licence fee model review, OpenAI news deals – weekly news digest

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