OpenAI has added publishing powerhouse Hearst to its formidable list of media partners. The force behind outlets including Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire, Car & Driver, Popular Mechanics, San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle will allow more than 20 magazine brands and over 40 newspapers to provide “a vast array of lifestyle content” as well as local news and niche insights to ChatGPT’s professed 200 million weekly users as well as, presumably, on the prototype SearchGPT that launched in July (with a planned ChatGPT integration).

In the past year, OpenAI has partnered with media enterprises including Reuters, Associated Press, Condé Nast, The Wall Street Journal publisher News Corp, Financial Times, and Dotdash Meredith.

In June, OpenAI and Time announced a ‘multi-year content deal’” allowing OpenAI “to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of the magazine’s history” as well as to “use Time’s content ‘to enhance its products,’ or, likely, to train its AI models,” CNBC writes.

In closing such deals, OpenAI has outdone Meta Platforms and Google, both of which have been sued for failing to pay to carry news abstracts.

Meta removed Facebook’s “News” tab earlier this year, while Google removed links to California news sites when that state tried to extract payment, later reaching “a compromise” with Cali legislators. Late last year, the Alphabet company reached an agreement to pay for Canadian news.

“These partnerships represent OpenAI’s broader ambition to collaborate with established media brands and elevate the quality of content provided through its AI systems,” reports VentureBeat, pointing out that the Hearst integration further expands OpenAI’s content-provider network, “ensuring users of its AI products, like ChatGPT, have access to reliable information across a wide range of topics.”

The agreement provides that “Hearst content in ChatGPT will include appropriate citations and link users to the original Hearst sources,” CNBC notes, specifying that “Hearst’s non-magazine and newspaper businesses will not be included in the partnership.”

“As generative AI matures, it’s critical that journalism created by professional journalists be at the heart of all AI products,” Hearst Newspapers President Jeff Johnson said in a joint announcement with OpenAI.

“Bringing Hearst’s trusted content into our products elevates our ability to provide engaging, reliable information to our users,” commented OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap.