Forbes sent a letter to the CEO of AI search startup Perplexity accusing the company of stealing text and images in a "willful infringement" of Forbes' copyright rights, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: Publishers fighting to protect their intellectual property are stuck in a game of whack-a-mole as they confront not just the biggest AI companies, like OpenAI or Google, but also smaller AI startups.

Catch up quick: Forbes general counsel MariaRosa Cartolano sent the letter days after Forbes chief content officer Randall Lane accused Perplexity's AI chatbot of ripping off Forbes' reporting without attribution.

• The chatbot tried to give credibility to the Forbes story it presented by citing other "sourced" reports that were actually just aggregated stories of Forbes' original report.
• Perplexity then sent a push notification to its subscribers of its version of the story and published an AI-generated podcast, which was then turned into a YouTube video, about the story.

That video, Lane said, "outranks all Forbes content on this topic within Google search." Lane and the author of the original Forbes article have both highlighted ways the Perplexity chatbot failed to appropriately cite Forbes.

The other side: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas tried to defend the company's practices, writing to a Forbes journalist on X that the incident was part of a new product feature that has "rough edges" and is being improved "with more feedback."

Zoom in: The letter, dated last Thursday, demands that Perplexity remove the misleading source articles, reimburse Forbes for all advertising revenues Perplexity earned via the infringement, and provide "satisfactory evidence and written assurances" that it has removed the infringing articles.

• It also demanded that Perplexity provide "written representations and assurances" confirming that it won't use any of Forbes' intellectual property or content to generate and publish AI chatbot articles and that it won't infringe on Forbes copyrights in the future.
• Forbes said "it looks forward to a reply" to its letter within 10 days of receipt. It threatened to reserve "all of its rights to take any action it deems necessary to protect its rights."

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Former Washington Post managing editor Kevin Merida was seen visiting the Post's headquarters and meeting with senior staff on June 5, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

• His trip was planned before former executive editor Sally Buzbee resigned and The Post's new CEO Will Lewis unveiled his new plan to restructure The Post's newsroom, but it didn't go unnoticed by anxious Post employees.

Why it matters: Merida, who stepped down as executive editor of the Los Angeles Times in January, is one of several Post veterans in contact with the paper amid intensifying scrutiny of its new leadership.

State of play: Former senior managing editor Cameron Barr, who stepped down last year and has been on contract as a senior associate editor, is overseeing the Post's coverage of new publisher and CEO Will Lewis.

• A source at the Post said Barr's new responsibilities were not announced internally and that newsroom employees heard about them through NPR media reporter David Folkenflik.

The latest: Until now, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had stayed quiet about the upheaval — leaving Post employees on edge about what comes next for the iconic newspaper and its election-year leadership.

• In a memo to newsroom leadership on Tuesday, Bezos vowed that "the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change."
• "You have my full commitment on maintaining the quality, ethics, and standards we all believe in," Bezos wrote.

Zoom out: The drama surrounding Lewis — who has come under fire for his ambitious newsroom restructuring and alleged involvement in a decades-old British phone hacking scandal — has begun to eat at employee morale.

• "I think we're all just exhausted," one newsroom employee told Axios.

The big picture: Internal frustration over the Lewis drama is the latest — but perhaps most significant — in a string of challenges the Post has faced over the last two years.

• With readership plummeting since the 2020 election, the Post shuttered its stand-alone print magazine in December 2022 and laid off magazine staffers as reports leaked out of its financial struggles.
• Layoffs accelerated in 2023 with cuts to the Post's gaming and kids sections. Later that year, longtime publisher Fred Ryan announced his departure and the Post offered voluntary buyouts in an effort to eliminate 240 jobs.
• Lewis started in January 2024 and delivered a presentation in May outlining his plan to divide the Post's editorial unit into three newsrooms. Buzbee resigned days later.

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Sports Illustrated turns 70 years old this August, but Minute Media, which now holds the rights to publish under its name, believes its most lucrative days lie ahead.

Why it matters: Minute Media's 10-year publishing deal has already changed the trajectory of the storied sports outlet.

• The vast majority of employees who were laid off during the transition of Sports Illustrated's publishing rights from The Arena Group earlier this year have been rehired, longtime Sports Illustrated editor-in-chief Steve Cannella told Axios.
• "I think it feels like we're getting back to normal," he added.

Driving the news: Sports Illustrated just closed its first print issue under the Minute Media umbrella last week. The edition, which features Olympian Athing Mu on the cover, is themed to the Paris Olympics and will be available on newsstands June 27.

• "We're very excited about print," said Minute Media CEO Asaf Peled. The firm just published the 60th anniversary edition of Sports Illustrated Swim last month.
• Cannella said the firm wants to focus more on building more direct relationships with its audience: "What we want to do is redefine what it means to be an SI writer, and lean into the ability that a lot of our talent has to be multi-platform personalities."
• Peled said Minute Media's global reach can help expand Sports Illustrated globally. He also noted opportunities to scale Sports Illustrated's business and reach by bringing the outlet onto its advertising and publishing tech platforms.

Zoom in: For Minute Media, the acquisition represents a lucrative opportunity.

• While the brand is not profitable yet, Peled said he expects it to be "quite accretive to Minute Media's financials both from a top line and from a bottom line standpoint in the relatively near future."

The big picture: Minute Media continues to grow despite a volatile publishing landscape, which means it can continue investing in Sports Illustrated's growth for the foreseeable future.

• The company expects to generate over $400 million in revenue this year, Peled said, up from roughly $300 million last year.

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Star athletes and top media executives joined the stage of Women's Sports House, hosted by Axios and Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment during the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, to discuss their careers and reasons to invest in the field.

Here are some highlights from Monday's and Tuesday's conversations.

NCAA women's basketball champion Flau'jae Johnson on her next venture:

• "I'm starting my beauty brand, Flawless, and I haven't really put enough into that being so busy with music, trying to drop this project, but that is something I'm definitely super excited about. It's kind of an untapped market. It's crazy because we have pretty athletes out here that love to wear makeup."

Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on AI deals:

• Lanzone said Yahoo has had "a bit" of conversations with AI companies but noted that a lot of Yahoo's content is focused on real-time coverage of things like sports and news. (AI companies tend to favor catalogs with evergreen content to train their large language models). Much of Yahoo's content is also syndicated from other media companies, and that could complicate licensing deals.

Six-time Grand Slam winner Rennae Stubbs on the Women's Tennis Association's partnership with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund:

• "I would like us to grasp the idea that we shouldn't be selling too much to the Saudis at this point."
• "I'm a little bit pissed off that we did that in a lot of ways. I understand the money was huge, but I would like companies in countries that don't squash women's dreams and their futures to be giving money to us."

Disney advertising president Rita Ferro on brands investing in women's sports:

• "There are over 100 brands" working with Disney "across 50 categories" supporting women's sports programming.

Gotham FC and U.S. Women's National Team forward Midge Purce on female athletes as storytellers:

• "I think people are more interested in female storylines than they are men's storylines. Men can kind of just profit on statistics and just like kind of the merit and the pureness of the sport more than women can. But once it's happening, storylines, what's actually happening on the court [matter]."

Check out the full schedule of remaining events this week here.

The latest drama enveloping Paramount Global will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the once-storied Hollywood relic as it has lurched from crisis to catastrophe over the past 20 years.

Why it matters: Paramount is already a shadow of its former self. Eventually, what's left will barely be worth fighting over.

Driving the news: The woman who controls the company, Shari Redstone, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory last week as she scuttled a planned merger with David Ellison's Skydance Media.

• Redstone had spent six months negotiating a complicated deal that would have given control of Paramount to Ellison and RedBird Capital, only to call it off as it neared the finish line.
• The chief reason for her decision: Her reluctance to let go of a family heirloom she fought very hard to get.

The big picture: Over the past two decades, Paramount (née ViacomCBS, née Viacom and CBS Corp.) has been a model of instability.

• Redstone's decision to form what was then called ViacomCBS in 2019 was seen as misguided: Too small to compete with growing giants like Netflix, yet big enough to make a sale complicated.

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