The nation’s largest newspaper chain turned heads Aug. 6 – in what would otherwise be a traditional, jargon-filled earnings call that garners few headlines – when USA Today executives announced its papers would be using Palantir to “collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization.”
Executives said the move is necessary as website traffic from Google and other intermediaries continues to sink. Mike Reed, CEO of USA Today Company, said the parent business will be using “Palantir’s AI-powered platform” to convert “the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated, first-party relationships.
“We have really a tremendous amount of data on consumers on our platform today and this work with Palantir is really going to allow us to connect that audience behavior, content engagement and first-party data in a way that allows us to monetize each consumer on the platform at a much higher rate,” Reed said during the earnings call.
The publicly traded USA Today Company is currently valued at more than $1 billion and owns more than 200 local newspapers across the country, 11 of which are in Illinois, including The State Journal-Register in Springfield. Larger, more national publications such as Politico, Thomson Reuters and Fox News have all worked with Palantir previously, but USA Today’s community papers appear to represent different subscriber bases from those national outlets.
Kristin Roberts, president of USA Today Media, said Palantir will help provide targeted advertising directly to subscribers, rather than sell advertising space like traditional marketing, in order to expand “the ways we generate revenue from those relationships.
“Commerce is one of the clearest examples, and we believe our work with Palantir has the potential to accelerate that opportunity. Historically, much of our commerce business has relied on manual processes to connect affiliate opportunities with our content. Our work with Palantir changes that by matching affiliate products and offers to relevant content at scale,” Roberts said.
Palantir, which is currently valued near $400 billion and supported by more than $5 billion in federal grants to date, has been criticized for retaining the services of government officials after they exit office. The company has also made controversial decisions to provide software services for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Israel’s military, which has been accused of genocide and war crimes by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and numerous other groups of interest.
Theresa Josephine Seipp, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam studying the intersection of AI, media and governance, told Illinois Times there’s a danger the move harms trust in USA Today papers.
“This can have quite severe consequences from a sustainability perspective because one of the main promises of local journalism, at least, is that you can trust it, that it is still local,” Seipp said. “In the U.S., data protection laws are a little bit different, but from a European perspective this would create quite a few issues.”
She emphasized that Palantir’s political influence could also cause readers to turn to other sources of news, or potentially abandon local news consumption altogether, which could snowball into other issues.
“If there is this belief that (personal data) is accessible by a company like Palantir, (that) might affect reading behavior. Then because a lot of the editorial decisions are also made based on readers’ behaviors, it can also perhaps lead to the belief that there is no interest in certain issues,” she said.
Tom Davis, a retired environmental lawyer in Springfield who has been a SJ-R subscriber for more than 40 years, said he has “a whole cesspool of concerns” about USA Today Company’s decision but doesn’t have immediate plans to cancel his subscription.
“I am planning to continue because there is occasionally useful information, but I’m very disappointed – my big concern is mass surveillance and indefinite retention of data. I’m concerned about everything from Flock cameras to data centers,” Davis said. “I have always worked for the government as a lawyer, but I’ve always been concerned about the police state. It used to be state and local; now we have federal police, and it’s paramilitary.”
Still, he lamented the diminished size of the SJ-R masthead.
“There have been so many good people leave that, sooner or later, the straw’s going to break the camel’s back. I can’t take AI-generated information, and in a way it’s kind of interesting but I don’t really need news from Rockford; we’re the capital city,” he said.
Tomás Dodds, director of the Public Tech Media Lab and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Illinois Times that publications need to be wary of whether a relationship with a tech giant after years of declining clicks via Google or Meta websites, for example, is the best long-term strategy.
“Palantir has a track record of collaborating with ICE and has a hand in military interventions, for example, in Iran. You cannot build brand loyalty by making your readers feel like they are entering a surveillance environment or they’re embedded with a surveillance company,” said Dodds, who recently co-authored Journalism in the Age of AI.
“There’s a lot of narratives about how it’s going to help personalize content, how it’s going to create new metrics for the audience, but truly there’s no explanation or rationale being presented to the audience of how journalism is going to be better because you now have created this dependency with Palantir,” he said. “The gap that exists between management in this company and the journalists who feel like (they) have a social responsibility and are going to be crucified because now they have lost some degree of independence, because they are embedded with a company that has such a terrible reputation.”
But USA Today executives like Reed, the CEO, seem less concerned about potential tradeoffs.
The software “will work to position us to turn up large amounts of first-party data that we have more actionable intelligence on. None of that is in our forecast for the year, so we think there’s upside from the work we’re doing from Palantir, both this year and in years to come,” he said.
Unionized reporters across the USA Today network, including the SJ-R Newspaper Guild, signed a letter Aug. 10 calling for USA Today Company to “immediately end its partnership with Palantir.”
Ryan Mahan, president of the SJ-R Newspaper Guild, declined an interview with Illinois Times. Andy Carrigan, the SJ-R’s interim editor, did not respond to multiple emails from IT.