The News/Media Alliance, a trade association for the news and media industry representing over 2,200 publishers in the United States, on March 25, 2025 submitted a letter to the founder and editor of Good Daily demanding the newsletter company comply with publisher directives to not scrape or otherwise use their content without permission, particularly content behind paywalls.
Click here to read the letter.
Good Daily operates and distributes local newsletters, that are reportedly AI-automated, in approximately 356 cities/towns across 47 states. Good Daily appears to be scraping and indexing News/Media Alliance members’ articles and other data to generate daily newsletters which include “short blurbs” of relevant news stories, followed by a link to the original source article. This runs contrary to many publishers’ terms of service, which expressly prohibit data scraping in this way.
Many have invoked robots.txt to block AI scrapers and bots, and some have paywalls that allow access to some or all their content to paying subscribers only. Good Daily does not disclose how it is obtaining publishers’ content and other information for indexing. Many other news aggregators respect publishers’ right to refuse having their data scraped, indexed, or otherwise used. Good Daily must do the same.
“Publishers must have control of how and where their copyrighted material is used,” commented Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance.
“As AI tools proliferate, we have to ensure that they are used responsibly. AI can be a powerful tool to empower journalists and to better inform communities across America, but if used recklessly it can undermine the health of the organizations that dedicate substantial resources to creating news and other media content for the American people,” Coffey added. “News media and AI-based entities can both continue to exist and thrive, but for that to happen sustainably, they must do so in cooperation, with publisher rights fully respected.”
