Nina Brown & Jared Schroeder: The Legal Implications of Generative AI in the Newsroom
Newsroom RobotsShow Notes
Nina Brown and Jared Schroeder join Nikita Roy to break down the intellectual property implications of generative AI models and explore the legal implications of using generative AI in newsrooms.
They examine the risks and liabilities associated with Generative AI outputs and historical legal precedents that could shape Generative AI regulations.
Nina Brown is an award-winning assistant professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She researches the legal issues with deep fakes, content regulation on social media, and emerging issues related to works created by artificial intelligence. She holds a J.D. from Cornell Law School and practiced law for several years before joining the Newhouse faculty.
Jared Schroeder is an associate professor of media law at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. His research focuses on freedom of expression and emerging technologies, particularly in press rights in the networked AI era. He is the author of three books, including his upcoming book, The Structure of Ideas: Mapping a New Theory of Free Expression in the AI Era, published by Stanford University Press.
✉️ Stay updated with the Newsroom Robots newsletter! Sign up here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Newsroom Robots
For most of journalism’s history, the article has been the atomic unit of news: a fixed container, written once and served the same way to everyone. That’s beginning to change. AI is moving out from behind the scenes, where it quietly powered efficiencies, and into the interface itself, where it can assemble, personalize, and adapt the news to each reader.
At The Seattle Times, an AI tool identified a new prospect and helped close additional ad revenue in a single day. The Seattle Times is one of 11 news organizations participating in the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft. Through this initiative, AI engineering fellow Rajesh Barade worked with the advertising team to address their challenges and developed a prospecting agent. This tool enables sales representatives to enter a category or focus area, identify businesses spending in that market, find decision-makers, access advertising spend data, and generate personalized outreach.
For years, the aggregator model was simple: curate the best journalism from thousands of publishers and send audiences their way. Now that contract is being rewritten, and Yahoo News is one of the most interesting places to watch it happen.
AI is settling in as infrastructure within newsrooms, a layer quietly reshaping how journalists discover information, how stories move through production, and how audiences increasingly expect news to reach them.
Most major newsrooms have now moved beyond early experimentation with AI. The main challenge now is determining how to govern effectively, scale consistently, and strategically position AI across the entire organization—while maintaining public trust as a central priority.