Funding: Own budget (94), Public broadcaster / state media (20), Tech company (Google/GNI) (11), Tech company (other) (9)
SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights) — industry coalition launched March 2026 by BBC, Financial Times, Guardian Media Group, Sky News, Telegraph Media Group and Mediahuis to address unlicensed use of journalistic content in AI models; goals: set shared technical standards for responsible AI use of journalism; develop sustainable licensing models so AI companies pay for publisher content; reduce friction in…
Future Optic — generative engine optimisation (GEO) as a commercial service; leverages Future's position as one of the most-cited publisher domains on ChatGPT (TechRadar is the most-cited publisher website globally on ChatGPT); creates tailored sponsored content campaigns for brand clients designed to boost their visibility on LLM platforms including ChatGPT; content is labelled as sponsored but is formatted with…
'The Economist – Graphs' — first dedicated ChatGPT app by a major consumer news publication (launched May 27, 2026); runs natively inside ChatGPT via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) app store that OpenAI opened in December 2025; at launch focused on The Economist's Donald Trump approval rating tracker, letting ChatGPT users ask questions about polling data broken down by state, demographic and voting issue and…
AI live blog summarisation tool: fine-tuned LLM on 3,700 decade-spanning live blog examples with human-written summaries to auto-generate rolling coverage summaries in Guardian editorial style; project ultimately abandoned after 4-month development due to high risk of undetected errors in long-form AI summaries
Times ExplorAItion — AI-powered synthetic audiences product for advertisers; first major UK publisher to bring a synthetic audience product to market from the supply side (launched April 27, 2026); built in partnership with Electric Twin (synthetic audience platform); pulls together multiple data sets — stripped-back subscriber behaviour, reader panels, engagement stats and third-party PAMCo industry data — and…
Syria mass graves investigation — custom AI tools built by data journalist Allison Martell to translate, index and search tens of thousands of photos of documents from the Assad regime's security forces, captured on the ground by Reuters reporters in post-Assad Syria; investigation exposed the Assad military's two-year clandestine operation to truck thousands of bodies from the mass grave at Qutayfah (Damascus…