HKFP joins the SPUR Coalition to defend original reporting against unpaid use by AI

Hong Kong Free Press has become an associate member of the SPUR Coalition as we seek a fair, rules-based relationship with the AI firms who have been benefitting from our newsroom’s journalism without payment.

Initiated this February by organisations including the BBC, Financial Times, Sky News and the Guardian, the coalition aims to shape the rules, standards and infrastructure that will enable a constructive relationship between news media and tech companies. HKFP is the first to sign up in Hong Kong.

Defending original journalism

The move is part of our newsroom’s effort to lead the charge in defending, protecting and monetising local journalism in the era of generative AI.

HKFP’s output was found to be the most cited Hong Kong news dataset in Google’s AI training model back in 2023. And, while our reporting is – on principle – free to air, it is not free to use.

We’ve therefore sought to regain control over those mining our archive of 30,000-odd news stories. An archive that was the result of 11 years’ work, that launched the careers of dozens of journalists, and that was powered largely by reader donations exceeding HK$35 million.

As New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger said of the tech firms in June:

“Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products — a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organisations that created this work. And this happens not just once during the training process, but countless times every single day.”
“Our profession has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the A.I. revolution… We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create. We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.”

Setting ground rules

Big tech is scooping up our audience, as well as journalism. With the advent of synthesised “AI summaries,” and internet users turning to AI chatbots, we are seeing “referrals” (clicks back to our news website) being decimated across search engines and social media platforms.

But, unlike the New York Times and others, we are not big enough to launch legal action or strike deals with the likes of OpenAI or Google.

Instead, we joined Pro Rata last year – an effort to prevent the unauthorised scraping of publisher content and to ensure a transparent, fair income for permitted uses. We also signed up to Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control, which promises to do something similar.

The SPUR Coalition is, by far, the most significant effort yet to set ground rules. In the coming months, members will seek to set licensing regimes and create technical tools to protect intellectual property and enable the transparent use of journalistic work.

Membership of the SPUR Coalition is not free of charge. If you would like to support our efforts to defend local, original journalism, please consider a one-off donation to our newsroom.

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Recurring donors unlock 8 benefits: Members get a free HKFP deer keyring or tote; ad-free browsing and no pop-ups; full access to HKFP Monitor, exclusive Tim Hamlett opinion columns; HKFP feature previews; 15% off all merch; Editor’s Blogs; and early access to our Annual/Transparency Report.

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HKFP was the first local news outlet to publish AI guidance in our Ethics Code, and we have pledged to ensure our reporting remains free of generative AI. Read more about our human-powered journalism commitment here.