The Wall Street Journal says Apple is talking to publishers about multi-year deals. The idea is to let Siri AI use their reporting to answer questions about what’s happening now. Perhaps it will look something like Gemini AI is already doing with Google, but Apple’s budget for this but be even bigger. According to the WSJ report, possibly hundreds of millions, depending on how much of each publisher’s work Siri ends up using.
Actually paying publishers is a shift from the usual scrape-now, argue-later routine that’s defined most of the AI industry so far. It means Siri might finally get real reporting and fewer confidently wrong answers.
Apple is betting on a new model of the news business
Apple seems to be betting on a version of the news business that doesn’t really match how most people get their information anymore. For instance, Siri can’t just parrot whatever’s trending on X, TikTok or YouTube. Apple needs sources with editors, corrections and someone who actually takes the blame when things go wrong.
The company has already learned how quickly AI-generated news can create trouble. Apple suspended notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in early 2025 after Apple Intelligence produced inaccurate summaries of publishers’ alerts. In one widely reported example, it falsely made it appear that the BBC had reported that murder suspect Luigi Mangione had shot himself.
Licensing real reporting means Apple can control what Siri says and how it uses that info. Publishers get paid, which matters now that AI answers are making it less likely anyone clicks through to the original version story.
For questions such as “What did the Federal Reserve announce?" If you ask Siri what the Fed did today or what’s up with the election, it’s safer to pull from vetted sources than to let Siri riff on whatever’s blowing up on online.er since audiences are finding news somewhere else.
People are consuming news through multiple outlets
How people actually find news has changed a lot faster than the newsrooms making it. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that social media and video networks have overtaken publishers’ websites and apps as a source of news across many of the markets it studied. Globally, 30% of respondents now describe social and video platforms as their main source, up from 22% five years ago.
The difference is even sharper among younger people. More than half of 18- to 24-year-olds said social media, video platforms and AI chatbots were now their primary route to news. For people between 18 and 34, the use of news websites and apps has fallen so quickly that those properties no longer represent the leading source for any age group globally.
Where those users place their attention has changed as well. A separate Reuters Institute study of young news audiences found that 51% of social media news users between 18 and 24 pay the most attention to individual creators and personalities. Only 39% said the same about traditional news organizations or journalists.
The pattern is visible in the U.S., too. Pew Research Center found that 38% of Americans ages 18 to 29 regularly get news from influencers, compared with 8% of people 65 and older. More than three-quarters of those younger users said they usually encountered that coverage rather than deliberately searching for it.
Even the safest Siri could still feel out of step
None of this means Apple should train Siri to repeat a podcaster’s speculation or treat an unverified video as established fact. Independent reporting and creator commentary vary enormously in quality, and social platforms can spread false information much faster than a newsroom can correct it. But the danger is at the other extreme. If Siri leans too hard on several of big publishers, the answers might be technically correct but still miss the point. It could repeat what’s in the official record and skip the interviews, eyewitness clips, niche newsletters and independent reporting that actually make for good reporting.
Without a doubt, this will make Sirie end up sounding disconnected with a summary that can't confirm the difference between firsthand reporting, analysis and random speculation. All of which, real human reporters can typically discern.
So while publishers might be able to give Siri a solid base, but they can’t cover the whole news ecosystem on their own.
Amanda's take
As a journalist, I want publishers to be paid when AI companies use their reporting. Apple licensing credible news is far better than Siri scraping articles, stripping away the context and answering without sending anything back to the people who did the work.
But I don’t think established publishers alone reflect how people understand the news anymore. I read traditional reporting, but I also listen to podcasts, follow independent journalists and watch firsthand videos that may capture a story before a major newsroom catches up. Younger iPhone users are even more likely to piece together what’s happening that way.
That doesn’t mean Siri should treat every viral post as fact. It means Apple needs a smarter system than a short list of approved publishers. Siri should be able to begin with what has been verified, clearly identify what remains unconfirmed and acknowledge credible reporting or firsthand accounts emerging elsewhere.
Apple is right to make reliability the foundation. But if it plays things too safely, Siri could end up giving accurate answers that still feel a day behind the conversation.
The Siri I want would not force me to choose between established journalism and the people documenting events in real time. It would help me understand which claims are confirmed, where they came from and why people are talking about them. Paying publishers is a strong start, but it cannot be Apple’s entire answer to how news works now.
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