Journalism gets monetized through Snowflake Marketplace

Artificial intelligence is accelerating change across newsrooms, and journalism is adapting.

Publications such as USA Today have embraced new strategies for maintaining a profitable business. Gannett Co. Inc., USA Today’s parent company, recently joined Snowflake Marketplace, making its information accessible through the AI feature, Cortex Knowledge Extension.

USA Today’s Renn Turiano and Snowflake’s Ben Srour talk with theCUBE about Snowflake Marketplace.

“The enterprises out there, they want relevant, factual content that they choose from brands that they know and that they trust,” said Renn Turiano (pictured, left), chief consumer and product officer at USA Today | Gannett. “We want consumers who are going to attribute us and pay us and allow us to control our content and our data when it’s out there in the world. And all of those things are enabled by design, by the governance that’s built into the system with Snowflake.”

Turiano and Ben Srour (right), principal product manager at Snowflake Inc., spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the impact of technology on journalism and how Snowflake Marketplace.                    (* Disclosure below.)

Mixing journalism with enterprise

Snowflake sees value in proprietary content gardens made available to a selection of enterprise customers, according to Srour. In the case of USA Today, its content is protected from other large language models, and its raw articles can be isolated from customers.

“Cortex Knowledge Extensions allows content owners like USA Today to bring their unstructured content to Snowflake customers through the Marketplace and basically get it monetized for customers to have it in their generative AI applications,” Srour explained. “Lots of opportunities for the first-party data and the third-party data to get contextualized together that nobody else can do today in enterprise AI.”

Monetization could sustain financially struggling publications, while customers benefit from a wellspring of trustworthy information. For example, enterprises could potentially tap into USA Today’s proprietary content to research compliance policies or scope out locations for a new office, according to Srour.

“Factual quality journalism is worth paying for,” he said. “Understanding context, clarity, truth: These are all things that are worth paying for. They’re worth being provided to those who can’t pay for it, as well. I think that’s why we are attracted so much to relationships like this. It is the seed of something really important to us. It’s about, ‘How do we define the future of news?’”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Snowflake Summit. Neither Snowflake Inc., the primary sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE