Mediahuis has joined the SPUR coalition of major news organisations aiming to develop shared AI licensing standards for the industry.
Mediahuis joins SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights) alongside the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, the BBC and Sky News who were attached when the initiative went public in February.
The intention is for SPUR to help shape rules and infrastructure around how news content is used in AI models, creating common standards around permission and payment.
Mediahuis chief executive Gert Ysebaert said: “The SPUR coalition addresses one of the key challenges facing our industry today: ensuring that quality journalism is used responsibly in the development of AI.
“Shared technical standards, licensing frameworks and reliable measurement tools are essential to secure a fair and transparent value exchange for our content.
“I believe this is a defining moment for European publishers as well, to join forces so that together we can actively shape how our journalism is used.”
Belgian-based Mediahuis is one of Europe’s biggest publishers with more than 30 newsbrands in Belgium, the Netherlands, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Luxembourg and Germany.
Some of its best-known titles include Belgium’s De Standaard, Dutch daily De Telegraaf, and the Irish Independent which it bought as part of a €145.6m buyout deal from Independent News and Media in 2019.
Mediahuis is widely experimenting with the use of AI in its newsrooms but has not publicly announced any licensing deals with AI companies to date.
SPUR members can still negotiate their own cash deals outside of their participation in the group.
Although the first founders to be announced were all UK based, they expressed their ambition for SPUR to be a global coalition to deal with a global challenge.
SPUR said it has attracted “significant interest” from news media organisations globally since it went public and will announce more new members within weeks.
Since going public, SPUR said it has “progressed technical work to enable the granular tracking of content usage online, with the aim of establishing industry standards”.
Its next steps include looking at ways to reduce friction in licensing, “identifying gaps in the technical tools needed to protect intellectual property, and ensuring that high-value journalistic content can be accessed through rights-cleared, accountable channels”.
The coalition is not a collective licensing body and will not seek to set pricing for use of content for AI, but aims to come up with a collective view on terms such as pay-per-crawl or pay-per-inference (when outputs are produced).
Financial Times CEO Jon Slade called for the formation of a “kind of NATO for news” to help the industry at a conference last year.
“At the moment, we’re all spending an enormous amount of money, each incremental to last year’s budget, in just trying to hold stuff back,” he told the Deloitte and Enders Analysis Media & Telecoms 2025 & Beyond Conference. “So there’s a good argument for a lot more collaboration around all aspects.”
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