
Axel Springer chief Mathias Döpfner holds a global all-hands meeting. (Screen shot)
On Wednesday, from a stage at Axel Springer’s headquarters in Berlin, Mathias Döpfner, the company’s chief executive, addressed employees around the world in a global all-hands meeting. Axel Springer—the German publishing group that owns POLITICO, Business Insider, and BILD—had streamed the event company-wide. Wearing a tailored blue suit over a T-shirt from the Cannes Lions advertising festival that read “We’re All Creators Again,” Döpfner delivered an impassioned and urgent message: artificial intelligence is no longer an optional tool to use. It’s here, and the company’s future depends on everyone embracing the rapidly advancing technology.
“I tell you, what is happening at the moment with regard to technology is the biggest change in modern civilization,” Döpfner said. “The first wave of internet is nothing against these developments.”
The 50-minute meeting—based on unlisted video uploaded by the company to YouTube and reviewed by Status—was the company’s first since its separation from the classifieds division last year in a deal with private equity firm KKR. Döpfner framed the move as a strategic reset. “It’s really like a new beginning,” he said. “A new era. The company is way smaller, but it’s way more focused and debt free and in the spirit of a true new beginning and new take off.”
The meeting covered a wide array of topics. Axel’s chief financial officer Mark Dekan said the company is exploring possible acquisitions to strengthen its footprint in “commerce, publishing, and so forth,” adding: “We are monitoring as always the M&A market.” And Döpfner also signaled plans to give employees some form of equity, saying that in 2025 he will "define a program that reflects our ownership culture,” so that employees are treated “like owners” and can “benefit from positive developments in valuation.”
But the core theme of the meeting, and the clearest messaging from Döpfner, was focused on A.I. and the company’s obligation to embrace it across every department. Döpfner repeatedly emphasized that using A.I. was no longer a suggestion, but an expectation. “Nobody in the company has to explain in the company why she or he is using A.I. to do something—whether to prepare a presentation or analyze a document,” he said. “You only have to explain if you didn’t use A.I. That’s really something you have to explain because that shouldn’t happen.”
While Döpfner said employees must use A.I., the extent to which it should be applied to actual story writing remained vague. At one point, he appeared to suggest it might be appropriate in some editorial contexts, but stopped short of offering any firm policy or guidance. “Of course, every mistake should be avoided and the credibility and truthfulness of our reporting is the most important thing,” he noted. “If we make a mistake we have to apologize.” But he also acknowledged that mistakes caused by A.I. are sometimes a necessary part of “embracing new developments.” A spokesperson for Axel Springer told Status afterward that Döpfner believes individual newsrooms should detail specifics regarding how they want their journalists using A.I. in the reporting process.
What was clear, however, is that Döpfner, at the very least, wants journalists to use A.I. tools in the research and reporting process. “You use A.I. how much you want but you also take the responsibility that you double and triple check that it’s true,” he said. “If you made a mistake with the A.I. it’s the same as if you would had done it without A.I.” He also notably drew a line against disclosing to readers whether A.I. was used in the process, saying the company would not disclose the use of other technology, such as Google, that plays a role in story production. “We would never say this article was made with the help of A.I.,” he said. “We also didn’t say this article was made with the help of [inaudible]. We always use all sources of information, and in the future more and more A.I.”
To reinforce his point about using A.I., Döpfner described how he personally uses tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity. After recently attending the Sun Valley conference, he said that he recorded a voice memo summarizing his meetings and fed it into ChatGPT which created a memo for him to send to executives rehashing what they missed. “It was the most perfect document I’ve ever sent," Döpfner exclaimed. He said he now relies on A.I. regularly in meetings to generate prompts and real-time analysis. He even disclosed that he was considering writing an op-ed about a subject and asked an A.I. tool to write a draft for him. Döpfner said the draft was so good, he questioned whether he should just publish it, or not write it at all, given he could not produce a piece as strong as the one the machine had spat out in seconds.
The urgency behind his A.I. mandate, Döpfner said, is driven by the fact A.I. is already disrupting the media business. He pointed to a significant drop in traffic from Google just days after the platform began generating its own news summaries using A.I. “It’s a little hint of what can happen and will happen with artificial intelligence… Everything is going to be disrupted,” he warned. Axel Springer, he added, will now treat direct traffic as its most important performance metric.
Döpfner’s remarks about A.I. likely represent the furthest any major media executive has gone in directing their employees to embrace the nascent technology. While other newsrooms have encouraged A.I. use and experimentation in limited capacities, few, if any, have delivered the kind of unambiguous message Döpfner did: that A.I. tools must be part of every employee’s workflow.
In some ways, his urgency may be strategically wise. Every newsroom will ultimately have to engage with A.I., one way or another. Döpfner is trying to force that adaptation now, rather than allowing competitors to beat the publishing house to the punch. His bet appears to be that early adoption could give Axel Springer an edge—especially if it helps streamline operations and allow brands to do more with less.
But the risks are also very real. The more aggressively A.I. is used in newsrooms, especially in the editorial process, the higher the stakes become. A single hallucinated “fact" could cause significant damage to a brand’s credibility. Which is all to say: Döpfner may be trying to get ahead of the curve, but threading that needle will not be easy. And it will require extraordinary care.
As the meeting came to a conclusion, Döpfner addressed another source of disruption: Donald Trump. Asked about what a second Trump presidency means for Axel Springer’s U.S. brands, he brought up the falsehood—spread by Elon Musk and other bad-faith right-wing media personalties—that POLITICO was being subsidized by the U.S. government. "Suddenly POLITICO Pro subscription was portrayed as government subsidy even though POLITICO never took a single cent of government subsidies," he explained. "So we have felt it already. But whether [Trump] is really a threat to free journalism, we will see. So far, we have been able to do what we want to do and operate in the spirit we are used to operate and we will not at all be intimidated or affected by any signs or signals like that."


NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Gutting Public Media: Donald Trump’s war on public media is nearing its endgame. After the U.S. Senate voted on Tuesday 51-50—with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote—to advance debate, Republicans are poised to claw back some $1.1 billion in funds previously allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to NPR and PBS stations. If Trump succeeds in stripping the funds, it will mark the culmination of a years-long Republican campaign against public broadcasters, whom he has derided as politically “biased” and a “grift” that “has ripped us off for too long.” But the move will deal a particularly heavy blow to rural, and in many cases, conservative regions the hardest, which will likely see stations go off the air over the loss of funding. “NOW IS A CRITICAL TIME TO ACT. The Senate is voting to eliminate Public Media funding,” a red banner blared on PBS’ website Wednesday. Congress now faces a midnight Friday deadline to approve the cuts.

The Trump administration sued three members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after he attempted to fire them. [WaPo]
San Francisco public broadcaster KQED announced it is cutting 15% of staff, resulting in dozens of layoffs, amid financial uncertainty. [KQED]
Status Scoop | Variety said it will launch a podcast called “Daily Variety,” focused on the business of entertainment, that will run Monday through Thursday, and be hosted by Editor-In-Chief Cynthia Littleton. “We're excited to start experimenting this week with a new podcast series that showcases Variety's incredible journalism,” Littleton told Status. [Apple Podcasts]
Press Forward announced it has granted $22.7 million in grants to 22 newsroom projects. [Nieman Lab]



President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Trump Turns On MAGA: Donald Trump is turning on his own MAGA base as backlash over the “Epstein files” intensifies. In a shocking post Wednesday morning, Trump disavowed his own supporters who have called for the release of Jeffery Epstein documents, trashing them as "weaklings" who "bought into this ‘bullshit’ hook, line, and sinker.” And he didn’t stop there, later in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters he had “lost faith in certain people” over the Epstein debacle, stating “they got duped by the Democrats and they’re following a Democrat playbook.” Of course, back here in the real world, it was Trump, Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and other high-profile voices in MAGA Media who whipped up Republicans into a frenzy over conspiratorial claims about a supposed cabal of pedophile elites. And it was Trump who then appointed those figures to his administration.
▶︎ Despite Trump’s attacks, MAGA Media stars are refusing to back down on the issue. “We're getting flooded with hundreds of thousands of comments that are very unhappy about this,” Charlie Kirk said on his show. “The idea that conservatives are obligated to also change on a dime and adopt this new perspective along with him is just madness. It's not even possible,” far-right podcaster Matt Walsh added. And conspiracy theorist Alex Jones went even further: “When somebody starts saying, ‘don't question things or you can't be in our club?’ Yeah, that's a cult.”

The Trump administration fired Maurene Comey, the federal prosecutor in the Sean 'Diddy' Combs and Ghislaine Maxwell cases. [Politico]
Elon Musk mocked Donald Trump’s reversal: “Wow, amazing that Epstein ‘killed himself’ and Ghislaine is in federal prison for a hoax 🤔” [Daily Beast]
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, having vowed to take action after Shari Redstone's "60 Minutes" settlement with Trump, introduced a bill with other Democrats to restrict contributions to presidential libraries. [Variety]
Gavin Newsom, speaking on “Pod Save America,” said of his lawsuit against Fox News that he’s “looking forward to discovery, to all your emails, all your text messages, Jesse [Watters], to all the senior producers, to the Murdoch family.” [YouTube]
Back and forth they go! Ben Shapiro returned fire at Tucker Carlson, saying the former Fox News host is "interested only in running down the United States." [Mediaite]


🤝 OpenAI said it will use Google's cloud to help support ChatGPT. [CNBC]
The $8 billion class action Meta trial related to Facebook privacy violations commenced. [AP]
✂ Cuts, cuts, cuts: Scale AI said it will cut 14% of its workforce after Mark Zuckerberg’s investment. [Bloomberg]
Threads started testing allowing users to sign up via a Facebook account. [SMT]


Fox Sports is nearing a deal with Barstool Sports that would bring its content to FS1, including Dave Portnoy appearances on the “Big Noon” show, Ryan Glasspiegel reported. [FOS]
Warner Bros. Discovery asked a court to dismiss a shareholder lawsuit stemming from its loss of NBA rights. [The Wrap]
NBCUniversal reached a $3.6 million settlement with Los Angeles County over claims it deceptively charged Peacock subscriptions. [THR]
The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors voted to eliminate hurdles for local filming. [THR]


A judge tossed Blake Lively’s claims against Justin Baldoni’s social media expert Jed Wallace in the “It Ends With Us” legal battle. [People]
The "Legend of Zelda" cast Bo Bragason as Zelda and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Link. [Deadline]
Ryan Gosling and Will Ferrell will star in an action comedy for Amazon MGM. [Deadline]
HGTV canceled Christina Haack's "Christina on the Coast” and Tarek and Heather Rae El Moussa's, “The Flipping El Moussas.” [People]
Netflix dropped the teaser for "Stranger Things" season five. [YouTube]
Searchlight said "Black Swan" will dance into IMAX for its 15th anniversary. [Deadline]
Ariana Grande dismissed rumors she will abandon singing. [Variety]
Fathom Entertainment and Paramount Pictures said it will put "Sunset Boulevard" in theaters for its 75th anniversary. [Variety]