Hi all. This time we explore how public media could think about prediction markets, plus pieces on reclaiming the public interest, SEO and AI search, how Americans are using AI at work, OpenClaw meets OpenAI, gaming’s influence on politics, and finally, generative video take on a Brandon Sanderson novel.

Well over 200 of you have already registered for our next PMI webinar, Thursday, February 19 at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT. How NPR is Using AI will feature a candid conversation with Erica Osher, NPR’s VP of AI Labs, Sharahn Thomas, NPR's VP of Content Operations and the Editorial Lead for AI, and Tony Cavin, NPR’s Managing Editor, Standards and Practices will give us an inside look at how NPR is approaching AI three years into this new era. We’ll start with a broad overview of the AI landscape for journalists and media organizations at the start of 2026, then dig into practical, real-world questions like:

Bring your most pressing AI questions; Q&A will be encouraged throughout.

A lot of the emerging media and the trends that shape emerging media which we discuss in this newsletter fall into the categories of AI, games and spatial media. But sometimes a trend hits my radar and I get a feeling, “Oh, we’re not ready.” That happened as I was reading Sarah Scire’s piece in NiemanLab, Sports betting reshaped newsrooms, and it’s “a little gross.” Now, here come the prediction markets

As someone conversant with but indifferent to the various forms of sportsball, sports betting seemed like a bad idea exacerbated by a society where hard work and discipline no longer suffice to build a stable economic life. But prediction markets are having a moment. They are, as this 2012 report from the Brookings Institute shows, not new. But they are taking on a new, less savory flavor in a post-Covid, Trump2 America.

If the concept of prediction markets is new to you, or if you’ve just lost the thread on them over the years, their current version allows you to place money into yes/no futures contracts that pay out based on whether the future event (defined by a set of rules for the contract) turns out to be a “yes” or a “no”. These events can range from the mundane — such as will the coin toss at the start of the Super Bowl be heads — to the economically consequential — such as will the Federal Reserve cut rates in March — to the geopolitically seismic — such as the will the US “invade” Venezuela. From Bobby Allyn’s report for NPR’s All Things Considered last month, “Critics say this is simply tech-powered gambling. But backers argue the wisdom of the crowd can forecast the future better than polls and the media.”

Of course, both can be true, and we’ll get to that in a minute.

You might have heard the term predictions market(s) bandied about around the 2024 US election. The polls were saying one thing, but the prediction markets were cited in the press as saying another. In previous election cycles, you might have instead heard a casual, offhanded reference to “Vegas bookmakers” or “Vegas odds” from those pundits wanting to put forth a edgier take on an upcoming election. “Prediction markets” sands away that edge and coats it with a veneer of respectability.

The two best known platforms for these contracts are Polymarket and Kalshi. But as of late 2024 you can also use the popular Robinhood financial app, which also allows stock, mutual fund and crypto trading. “Turn your insights into trades,” the website description reads. “Prediction markets let you express your view on real-world events — from sports to politics to economics.” Because these are trades, not wagers, they should be then subject to insider trading restrictions. But that regulation doesn’t exist.

So, does your public media organization have a policy on prediction markets?

There are at least two ways I’m thinking about this right now. The first is citing prediction market data, with proper contextualization, in the content we create. Solely basing a story on prediction market odds seems shallow, if not shady. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to include prediction market data, especially when it runs counter to conventional wisdom and punditry.

What if the stakes were money but on-site engagement? Forbes is taking the prediction market concept and turning it into a web-based game to make their site more sticky (and trim site traffic losses thanks to AI’s impact on web search). From the Digiday article Forbes tests prediction platform as engagement strategies move past search, by Sara Guaglione: “The publisher [Forbes] worked with tech startup company Axiom (Axiom founder and CEO Jeff Yam is a Forbes board member) to build its own prediction platform – ForbesPredict – which will launch in beta in February. Unlike real-money prediction markets like Kalshi or Polymarket, Forbes’ platform lets readers make forecasts and track results in exchange for tokens. It’s designed for engagement, not wagers.” You all know I’m very much a believer in the power of video games to increase public media website engagement. Should this type of website experience be fair game?

But then there is whether staff, or which staff, should be allowed to engage in “prediction market trading.” Sports betting is one thing, and maybe you already have a policy on that. But now staff could put money against which party will win your state’s next gubernatorial or senate election. Eventually that could extend to the outcome of certain state legislation. It happens at the national level now. Ignoring their lack of understanding about how public media is funded in the US, Kalshi had a market for “Congress defunds NPR in 2025?”.

I’m not anti-prediction markets. But a fool and his money are soon parted, as the saying goes, so I think they should be regulated more than they currently are. And you may have a different opinion on that point. But this all feels like crypto circa 2020 to me, and so I think it is something editors and leadership teams need to give some consideration to in 2026.

For a deeper dive into prediction markets, the financial website NerdWallet has a helpful primer published in October 2025, Prediction markets: How they work, risks and calculator.

Okay, on to the links.

Reclaiming the Public Interest? (Jax Deluca - Shorenstein Center)
From the Commentary: "Minow understood that public obligations require institutional backing. The Carnegie Commission understood that those obligations had to be embedded in durable, locally rooted infrastructure. The task now is to carry that logic forward: How do we design a broader public media infrastructure that reflects today’s technological realities while honoring longstanding public-interest commitments? Public broadcasting remains an important part of that ecosystem, but it cannot carry the full burden alone. Reclaiming the public interest will require new forms of investment, governance, and coordination across public broadcasters, nonprofit media, cultural institutions, universities, and community-based organizations....[T]he challenge before us is not simply to modernize public broadcasting, but to imagine a broader public media infrastructure that spans technology, institutions, funding, and governance."
Why It Matters: I'm starting to see a division in public media practitioners. On the one hand you've got a contingent - I think of them as traditionalists - that advocate for doubling down on a local linear video and audio production system, anchored by dominant national brands distributing "popular" content at scale. On the other hand, you've got a much smaller contingent that looks to a range of post-broadcast models of media (from short-form digital, to interactive, to games, to spatial media, and even to AI). I see Deluca's evolving research (this is supposedly post 2 of 5) as supporting a middle ground that does not abandon broadcasting but opens the door to other ways of serving publics through media. I said it the previous edition but keep an eye on Deluca's work. It's work to watch.
Related: Deluca's project deck for Media in the Public Interest?
Make Your Voice Heard: Respond to Deluca's short survey.

How other nonprofits think about AI (Ernesto Aguilar via LinkedIn)
From the Post: "The report’s central finding: the biggest barrier to AI adoption isn’t technical. It’s cultural. Nonprofits, much like public media stations, are filled with 'shadow users,' people quietly trying AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini without clear permission or guidance. Yet most staff hesitate to talk about it for fear of getting it wrong. Sound familiar?"
Why It Matters: Ernesto is a friend of PMI and I've been remiss in not featuring more of his writings on AI. Here his message is simply, and it's one we've also tried to impart here in this newsletter. Just get online and try these tools out. Things are changing so fast that even if you tried chatbots in 2023 and drifted away from them you can come back. There really isn't any "first mover" advantage any more for the use of AI at our level, and doing nothing is the worst approach you can take to AI.
Related: I specifically want to give a shout out to Ernesto's piece from November, How public media disrupts slopcore, but you should really check out all of his posts at AI and Public Media Futures.

How PBS Kids Hopes to Save Children’s Programming (Abbey White - The Hollywood Reporter)
From the Article: "It started with Elinor Wonders Why, which is a science show. The episode pauses, Elinor breaks the fourth wall and asks the kids a question about what’s happening, and then creates some conversation. “What’s your hypothesis? How would you make that sauce come out of the bottle faster?” All of that was not generative. The AI is about parsing the kids’ language and finding the right answer that was then written by the scriptwriters. There’s [also] a follow-on with Lyla in the Loop on computational thinking for slightly older kids in the field right now. This type of AI usage can really help us better think about the educational possibilities of media." - Sara DeWitt answering a question about their "work around programming and AI research"
Why It Matters: Even if kids and educational content isn't your jam, it's worth tracking the experiments they do because they are serving the media consumers that we hope to impact as adults come the middle of this century. Their media consumption habits and expectations are being shaped now, in no small part by PBS Kids. (Full disclosure, for 2026 I'm current the Chair of the PBS Kids Advisory Council.)

The Guardian debuts new flagship video podcast (Max Tani - Semafor)
From the Article: "The growing US outpost of the left-leaning British publication is launching a daily video podcast later this year, Semafor has learned, to compete with the likes of The New York Times and NPR. The show will be co-hosted by WNYC host Kai Wright and The Guardian’s Carter Sherman, and will have a staff of ten employees."
Why It Matters: This is more a heads up than anything you necessarily need to click. The competition at the national level only gets more intense, But there's still lots of room at the local level.

A TV-first workflow structurally underserves the majority of your audience. (Jill Manuel via LinkedIn)
From the Post: "Digital-first doesn't mean abandoning broadcast. It means changing the order of execution. Old model: TV → Web → Social (promotion). New model: Write → Post → Social → Broadcast."
Why It Matters: She makes a couple of valid points in this short post. Public media needs a transition plan away from our broadcast-first model. If we flip the scrip, as she counsels, maybe can get to a point where the end of broadcast will seem less traumatic because of our adaptation to what comes next.

Alfred Hitchcock Reframed For Microdrama Generation (Max Goldbart - Deadline)
From the Article: "The movie is available now in the U.S. on nascent UK microdrama app Tattle TV in vertical form. Tattle said the move is 'one of the first known instances of a classic feature film being fully reframed for vertical, mobile-first consumption.'"
Why It Matters: I struggle between being a purist about this(i.e., this is in no way what Hitchcock intended) and being more open minded (i.e., maybe this will bring more people to the original presentation). But what it's made me realize is that I'm definitely more pro-adaptation when the content is factual and the primary purpose of the content is convey information.

With no local news, those in news deserts turn to social media feeds, influencers and gossip (Michael Lev & Eric Rynston-Lobel)
From the Article: “'News industry professionals would all agree on the basic differences between real journalism and merely being informed, but if the consumer doesn’t share that distinction, or can’t see it, that raises issues,' said Mackenzie Warren, Interim Executive Director of the Local News Initiative. 'Is this an example of the market deciding not only that it doesn’t understand but maybe doesn’t value or miss what we think is so valuable?'”
Why It Matters: There was a time before "news." Sure it was about 500 years ago, but news isn't a given in human societies. The sharing of information, however, is arguably part of what led to Homo sapiens dominating the planet. How do we square this circle? What do you do when the market is fine with empty calories so long as they feel full at the end of the meal? Public media has a role to play there, to be sure, but the message we've been getting for 20 years now is that many consumers do not see the ROI on paying for news. Some of us are starting to listen, I think. But not enough.

A Reflection on SEO & AI Search in 2025 (Lily Ray via Substack)
From the Article: "Many opportunists have positioned this shift as a total departure from existing organic search strategies. However, the reality is much more measured. While there are distinct differences - especially in the search interfaces, the prompting experience, and the metrics used to measure impact - many, if not most, of the actual tactics to drive AI visibility haven’t changed much. They are simply evolved versions of existing SEO, branding, and digital PR processes....[A] solid, cohesive SEO, social media & digital PR strategy is by far the most effective way to capture visibility in AI search. Unless LLMs find a way to generate accurate, up-to-date answers without relying on search engines, SEO will continue to remain imperative for AI search success."
Why It Matters: Some year-in-review pieces are fluff, but this one delivers the goods. Anyone in marketing or content creation at your station should read this one. I chose to pull the quote above as a sign that this one isn't as scary as you'd think. But don't let that quote lull you into complacency. It just scratches the surface, and you need to understand both why a professional SEO strategy is still your best defense against digital irrelevance and what could change in the future that would undermine that.
Related: Search Engine Land's Google AI Overviews follow up questions jump you directly to AI Mode, by Barry Schwartz

What Metrics Matter? Two Case Studies. And a Survey. (Adiel Kaplan - (Re)Structured News)
From the Post: “[W]hat does seem clear is that website traffic patterns are changing, sometimes wildly, and we don’t yet know how they correlate with content, audience, and strategic decisions about AI. As information becomes increasingly individualized and intermediated by AI systems, we’re facing fundamental questions about measurement....The AI information age requires re-evaluating our metrics — which matter most, and how to find or create new ones for all news business models, ones that hopefully better measure the value and service news organizations seek to provide. And which ones may lead to more dollars coming in the door. It’s not that traffic is dead, but that traffic is changing, and the more we understand that change, the better our ideas will be about what can come next.”
Why It Matters: What I like about this summary is that it focuses less about figuring out how to win at a rigged game and is more focused on how we need to change the rules of the game. Of course, the "market" has to play along. But this is the type of thinking that inspires innovation in the market.

How Americans are using AI at work, according to a new Gallup poll (Matt O'Brien & Linley Sanders - AP)
From the Article: "The survey found roughly one-quarter say they use AI at least frequently, which is defined as at least a few times a week, and nearly half say they use it at least a few times a year. That compares with 21% who were using AI at least occasionally in 2023, when Gallup began asking the question, and points to the impact of the widespread commercial boom that ChatGPT sparked for generative AI tools that can write emails and computer code, summarize long documents, create images or help answer questions."
Why It Matters: For me, reading the amount of AI press that I do, it's easy to feel like the entire AI revolution is passing public media by in a blur. The realities are more measured as this report (and those below) quantify.
But You Don't Have to Take My Word for It: Read Gallup's Frequent Use of AI in the Workplace Continued to Rise in Q4 for yourself
Related: Microsoft reports on the Global AI adoption in 2025 — A widening digital divide, and the US isn't even in the top 20 countries

Action, Ease & Personalization: AI Chatbot News Experiences (Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein, Prabhat Mishra, Emily Wright, & Tara Fannon - Center for News, Technology & Innovation)
From the Overview: "CNTI found that most AI chatbot users currently use them to supplement their existing information repertoires, not to replace them entirely. They toggle back and forth between AI chatbots, news sites, search engines, official sources and more....Interviewees use AI chatbots to act on what’s happening and understand it, more than simply to know about it or to feel something about it....AI chatbot users see these tools as fast, easy, personalized, customizable and friendly ways of getting information....Few AI chatbot users have deep knowledge about the processes behind either journalism or AI chatbots. At the same time, interviewees express a general trust of AI chatbots alongside a general distrust of news media (outside of some users’ trust in their specific sources)."
Why It Matters: The results of the study indicate that ChatBot users are seeking the very type of informational contextualization that public media provides. And as I read through it, I'm reminded of other studies that talk about how younger news consumers are looking for solutions-oriented journalism. While this study doesn't reveal the whole puzzle, it does feel like a key piece of that puzzle.
But You Don't Have to Take My Word for It: Download the CNTI report for yourself.
Related: There are similarities in this report and the NextGen News 2 report, as well.

OpenAI hires the developer behind OpenClaw — this is how agentic AI grows up (Jason England - Tom's Guide)
From the Article: "The key to OpenClaw is in it being an open agent framework — the standard protocol for how different AI agents talk to each other. To do this, and at the level of virality it received, Steinberger was spending $10,000 to $20,000 per month out of pocket just to keep the infrastructure running."
Why It Matters: Last week, I wrote a bit about how OpenClaw (née ClawdBot) was an interesting glimpse of the future (if, perhaps, and uncomfortable one). At the time I thought that, in the release of OpenClaw and is agentic social media companion, MoltBook, there was a certain rhyming quality with the public-and-be-damned style of release OpenAI used with ChatGPT in November 2022. Guess OpenAI liked the Steinberger's moxie.
Related: OpenAI’s self-generated report from last September via the National Bureau of Economic Research analyzing 1.5 million consumer conversations for How People Are Using ChatGPT.
Also Related: A different but similar study from the AI search engine and web browser company Perplexity, published with Cornell, on How People Use AI Agents.

Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal (Aisha Down - The Guardian)
From the Article: "GPT-5.2 is not the only large language model (LLM) that appears to be citing Grokipedia; anecdotally, Anthropic’s Claude has also referenced Musk’s encyclopedia on topics from petroleum production to Scottish ales. An OpenAI spokesperson said the model’s web search 'aims to draw from a broad range of publicly available sources and viewpoints'."
Why It Matters: Garbage in, garbage out. Though I've been a ChatGPT Plus subscriber from Day 1, I've been feeling a stronger pull toward Google Gemini, especially as they've taken the lead with multimodal AI. This news is not pulling me back in OpenAI's direction.
Related: As Amanda Caswell reports in Tom's Guide's QuitGPT is going viral — here’s why people are cancelling ChatGPT, I guess it's not just me.

OpenAI’s Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies (Alex Katrowitz - Big Technology)
From the Lede: "OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%."
Why It Matters: And speaking of QuitGPT (see above), while I'm a bit chagrinned to see Grok growing so much that's just the state of the world right now. I'm not surprised about Google's rise. They've got a war chest and the technology backbone to go the distance.

Longtime NPR host David Greene sues Google over NotebookLM voice (Anthony Ha - TechCrunch)
From the Article: "Among other features, Google’s NotebookLM allows users to generate a podcast with AI hosts. A company spokesperson told the Post that the voice used in this product is unrelated to Greene’s: 'The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired.'”
Why It Matters: When NotebookLM initially hit the mainstream, did you hear it and think, "Damn, NPR should sue." David Greene apparently agreed with you.

Gaming is bigger for politics than we realize (Katie Harbath - Anchor Change)
From the Substack: "60% of adults play video games every week. The average age of today’s player is 36 years old. Nearly half of boomers (ages 61-79) and 36% of the Silent Generation (ages 80-90) play video games weekly. The split between men and women is roughly equal: 47% women, 52% men. Gaming isn’t just Gen Z males in their parents’ basement. It’s a massive, diverse audience that campaigns keep treating as a “nice gimmick” instead of a strategic channel."
Why It Matters: We've been advocating for public media to get into general audience gaming for a couple of years now (and walking the walk with our own investments). So whenever I see another 'wake up and smell the game play' post I'm inclined to include it here...especially when it's directed at an audience that normally discounts game creation. Harbath's piece is good, easily digestible overview of the games industry for politicians, and it isn't hard to extend her guidance to our industry.

RIP Hollywood (PJAce via X) - And finally, if you are a fan of the author Brandon Sanderson, or just interested in the current state of the art with generative video, you might find this a sobering wake up call. It isn’t flawless, but it was supposedly made in two days. Give someone a year’s salary (at a California cost of living rate) and one year, and what could they make?

And if sci-fi/fantasy isn’t your thing, here’s Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt (until one of them calls Elon and has it taken down).