StW: Southern Cross Austereo makes up its mind about ACM; New alarm over uninvited AI scraping

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead. In today’s audio-led edition: Which door will the SCA management choose? And, to very few people’s surprise, the AI companies do not appear to be playing fair when crawling publishing content.Have you considered becoming a paying member of Unmade to get the full picture? Only our paying members receive our members-only Tuesday analysis; get access to our archive where all our content is paywalled after two months; get their own copy of Media Unmade; and receive discounts on all our events. Become a member today.Will it be The Cat’s week?If The Australian is correct, this may be the week where the board of Southern Cross Austereo makes up its mind about whether it wants to get into bed with Antony Catalano’s Australian Community Media.As we discuss in the podcast, the choice boils down to two alternative paths - the pureplay audio future visualised by SCA’s management where the company’s Listnr investment begins to pay for itself; or an attempt to become a multi-platform regional powerhouse.Also today, there’s growing evidence that AI companies are scraping news sites without permission. Meanwhile, local publishers with traffic built around SEO are becoming increasingly alarmed by Google’s AI Overviews product which threatens to cost them clicks by giving a full answer on the page.Further reading:* The Australian: Southern Cross ‘heavily engaged’ on ACM merger bid* Australian Financial Review: Publishers fear this new Google AI feature will kill their traffic* Reuters: Exclusive: Multiple AI companies bypassing web standard to scrape publisher sites, licensing firm says* Unmade: Is it blackmail?* Unmade: Domain becomes biggest part of Nine’s worthToday’s episode features Tim Burrowes and Abe UdyEditing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.Time to leave you to start your week. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.Toodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com