KeyCrew Media, a real estate intelligence and media company, is meeting with members of Congress and their staff in Washington, D.C., this week as part of the News/Media Alliance’s 2026 Support Journalism Fly-In. The company is among more than 220 participants from news, magazine, and digital-only publishers advocating for legislation that governs how AI companies use journalistic content.
KeyCrew Media licenses its own content broadly, including to AI platforms, which might make its support for stronger protections seem counterintuitive. However, the company argues there is no conflict: every publisher should have the legal right to decide how its work is used, whether that means broad licensing or stricter limits.
The fly-in serves two purposes: celebrating congressional champions of the news industry and reinforcing the need for legislation that supports quality journalism. KeyCrew’s focus in its meetings is on clear rules for AI companies’ use of publishers’ content. The company advocates for properly defining how content is used, distributed, and consumed by AI platforms—a position rooted in its own business model, which relies on a legal framework governing what the company and third parties can do with its reporting.
Steve Marcinuk, Co-Founder and CEO of KeyCrew Media, emphasized that the issue is not that AI companies use news content, but how some of that use occurs. “There’s a real risk right now that large tech companies are using information without proper licensing, building solutions on the back of work done by local organizations, with no compensation, no oversight, and no responsibility,” Marcinuk said. Many AI platforms were trained on content that was not properly sourced, leaving publishers to determine how to enforce their preferences going forward.
Marcinuk noted that while technology can help block unauthorized scraping, it cannot settle who has the right to decide. “How individual publications set up and enforce their rights over what can and can’t be done with their content is a technology question, in terms of putting the right solutions in place to prevent scraping,” he said. “But it’s also a legal one, and that part is of great importance.” Legislation is needed to establish that authority.
KeyCrew is more open about AI use than many traditional publishers, but Marcinuk says that openness is a choice—and the ability to make that choice is what the fly-in aims to protect. “We’ve made a conscious choice to be very open about where our content can be used and distributed. We’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and money setting up the right legal framework to make that possible, including licensing to AI companies and other downstream partners,” he said. “But let’s not confuse concepts. That is us expressing our choice for what is done with our content, the same way other publications should be able to enforce their rights about what can and can’t be done with theirs.”
He also pushed back on the notion that publishers seeking protections want to shut AI out entirely. Many publishers KeyCrew has met through the News/Media Alliance already license content to AI companies with legal structures and clear terms on use, display, and compensation. “It’s not the case that every publisher is trying to completely block their content from appearing in AI in every form or being used in training. Far from it,” Marcinuk said. “But they are having thoughtful conversations about how their content will appear, and they have every right to do so.”
As more people get information through AI platforms and AI companies consume more content than ever, Marcinuk sees this as a pivotal moment for media companies to be at the center of decisions about their content. The outcome matters beyond publishers’ revenue: when local organizations cannot control or be paid for their work, fewer can afford to keep producing it, affecting readers, subscribers, and the ability to operate well into the future. For KeyCrew, which interviews local experts across hundreds of real estate markets and provides coverage to publishers filling gaps in local reporting, a healthy media ecosystem is part of its own foundation. Clear legal protections would give every publisher the ability to choose its own path with AI, whether through broad licensing like KeyCrew’s or tighter limits.
