All sorts of industries will angle for exemptions to the 25% tariffs that President Donald Trump placed on goods from Canada and Mexico.

I’d argue that the newspaper industry has as good a case as any, but I’m clearly biased here.

Canada supplies most of the newsprint used in America and there’s no easy way for the U.S. to quickly replace its production.

Hundreds of newspapers could close if the newsprint tariff continues for long.

Local newspapers already cut to the bone and then some in recent years. Especially hard hit are small papers in rural and suburban communities.

Abruptly raising their largest material cost by 25% for no apparent reason will be the last straw for some.

Others will try to get through this bizarre spat by further cutting the number of pages they print.

“Right now, I think most of the smart publishers are reducing their page counts as much as they can,” said J. Louis Mullen, a Wyoming publisher who runs six printing plants and more than 40 weekly newspapers, including The Newport Miner in northeastern Washington.

Mullen said he’ll “do my damndest” to get through this storm and believes his products are still financially viable.

“I’m worried about other newspapers that are in worse shape than I am, the ones that are already on the margin of just squeaking by,” he said.

Mullen is on the board of the National Newspaper Association, a trade group that asked in January for newsprint to be exempted from tariffs.

Raising newsprint costs forces papers to increase subscription prices, the NNA wrote in a letter to congressional leaders.

“But these increases cause downward pressure on circulations, which makes the newspaper less valuable to advertisers and further depresses advertising income to the newspaper,” it wrote.

Forecasting such multiplier effects may be difficult, the group continued, “but small towns will feel the effects for many years if the tariffs continue because they will lose their local newspapers.”

Publishers might pursue legislation, such as a new version of the Print Act introduced in 2018, to suspend taxes on “uncoated groundwood paper” while the impacts on the printing and publishing industry are studied.

That ended up being unnecessary as those tariffs were halted in 2018 by the U.S. International Trade Commission.

It ruled that U.S. industry “is not materially injured or threatened” by the import of Canadian newsprint, which adds to the question of why we’re doing this again.

AI taking traffic, too: A new report confirms the news industry’s fears about AI search engines and chatbots: They are not only scraping news content, they’re taking web traffic publishers need to survive online.

TollBit, a content-licensing startup, found that click-through rates are 91% lower on AI search engines than conventional Google search results.

It’s worse with AI chatbots: Their users are 96% less likely to click through to the websites of publishers that did the work reporting the news.

Publishers already get less revenue than they should from news appearing in Google search results.

TollBit’s report suggests things may go from bad to much worse for outlets staking their future on digitally delivered news. Unless, that is, they’re able to get fairly compensated for their work and AI platforms make clear the source of news they regurgitate.

Several Western countries are requiring tech platforms to negotiate content-usage agreements with news outlets but similar legislation stalled in Congress and states.

The News/Media Alliance trade group said that while publishers may use AI in their businesses, they need AI companies to pay for content “for the long-term health of both of our industries.”

“By illegally scraping our content, repackaging it, and giving it to consumers without adequately directing them to our sites, AI companies are using our own content to undermine our businesses,” CEO Danielle Coffey said in a release, calling out TollBit’s report. “Without web traffic, news and media organizations lose subscription and advertising revenue, and cannot continue to fund the quality work that both AI companies and consumers rely on.”

New York-based TollBit aims to insert itself between publishers and platforms with a content-licensing marketplace. It raised $31 million from investors who see this as a potentially big business.

TollBit’s report makes a case for why licensing deals are necessary for publishers getting fleeced, again, by online platforms.

“These figures give an indication of the change in traffic levels publishers can expect if user queries move from conventional search to AI applications,” the report states. “They also starkly highlight the difference in the value for publishers when providing their content for use by AI applications versus conventional search. The return cannot be expected to come in the form of traffic from AI applications.”

Some publishers are already doing AI licensing deals individually and through other intermediaries like Dow Jones.

I wonder if their work is still undervalued, especially if AI services will truly eliminate most search referrals to their websites.

By giving AI firms a critical mass of news material, these publishers may also be weakening their industry’s leverage and ability to collectively secure fair compensation for both small and large organizations.

Other TollBit findings add to the angst.

It found huge increases in AI bots scraping websites, including a 6,768% increase by ChatGPT bots from the third to fourth quarters of 2024. Overall, it found scraping as a percentage of sites’ traffic more than doubled last quarter. ChatGPT operator OpenAI didn’t reply to my request for comment by deadline.

The report said websites are increasingly visited by AI bots instead of humans. The problem is that publishers can’t monetize bot traffic because ads aren’t served to them and they don’t buy subscriptions.

“For example, an AI agent may access five media websites in order to respond to a prompt that satisfies a user’s need without them needing to visit another online property,” the report said. “Prior to the advent of AI, this may have resulted in multiple (human) Google searches and visits to websites.”

TollBit also found AI crawlers are frequently ignoring publishers’ requests to stop scraping content. Publishers use the robot.txt instruction on websites to block crawlers; it’s the software equivalent of a stop sign.

Yet the number of AI bots ignoring these stop signs grew more than 40% last quarter. Many are also hiding their identity; the number of “hidden scrapes” per website averaged 1.89 million in the quarter, TollBit found.

Perhaps we need tariffs on bots instead of newsprint.

This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.