My business epiphany came after midnight one cold February night — and it came from Claude Code: It’s time for publishers to collectively build a marketplace for digital information.
For four decades, I have filled a career with work as a reporter, editor, publisher, entrepreneur and journalism researcher. Since the 1990s, colleagues have wanted one-click, one-bill, multi-site access to news. They told me they’d pay up to $10 a month for that convenience.
In 1994, colleagues and I designed an open-standard market exchange, enabling publishers to earn money by referring subscribers to trustworthy content on affiliated sites — a shared clearinghouse built on standards for trust, identity, privacy and commerce.
But publishers weren’t interested: Who would start it? How would they get paid, or keep control of their subscribers? A decade before paywalls existed, it was too much to imagine without a working demo — and building one was too costly a risk without guaranteed adoption.
That’s changed.
Claude and its competitors have cut the cost of prototyping code by orders of magnitude. Publishers now expect to be paid for content beyond advertising. Users will pay for quality but show subscription fatigue. And AI companies keep acquiring publisher content under disputed “fair use” claims, training models or summarizing content instead of linking to it. Courts will settle it, but likely not soon. What the internet needs now is a public-benefit way to make paying for information easier than pirating it.
As The New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger said in a June speech, our profession “has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution.”
Cloudflare co-founder Matthew Prince made a related point in his 2025 shareholder letter: content creators can’t work for free, and internet users crave more “creative, local, unique, original content.”
On that February night, I spent three hours prompting Claude with two decades of patent language, business rules and specs from a system we designed, built and patented — now expired and in public domain. Claude produced code for a four-party exchange: user-owning publishers, content-vending publishers, a single-sign-on settlement “cloud,” and end-user subscribers. I wrote up the story, “Are you ready to take collective action,” in long form on my Substack.
How it would work: No central database of usernames. Each publisher owns its own users. Pricing is set by each content owner in a real-time market. No personal data needs to change hands to transact. A trusted nonprofit can revoke exchange access for policy violations. A user’s “homebase” publisher or agent pays for content in real time — as a subscription add-on, bundle, or à la carte item — and bills the user on terms set between them.
As Fran Wills of the Local Media Consortium told Editor & Publisher in March, the industry is still asking what its content is worth to LLMs — and what LLMs are willing pay. This system lets the market answer that directly, much like programmatic advertising: agents offer, counter and accept in real time.
In 2017, we formed the Information Trust Exchange Governing Association (ITEGA.org), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, to advance this marketplace idea. It sets no prices and dictates no terms beyond basic privacy and business rules. No one can own it for personal gain. The governance structure and related documents are drafted. The protocols are defined. Working code — off-patent and open source — now exists. What’s missing is people willing to prototype and test it. Whether you’re a publisher or simply believe in fair, easy payment for trusted journalism, you’re needed! Email your interest to nextstep@itega.org and join us as we schedule a virtual next-steps roundtable.
Bill Densmore is a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow and founder of ITEGA.ORG, based in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He welcomes your emails at wpdensmore@itega.org. Densmore used Claude Sonnet 5.0 to shorten a final draft of this column and reviewed the result, line by line, for accuracy. For more information: https://rjionline.org/news/
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