I want to thank Taylor Swift for explaining music rights.

In her epic battle to regain control of her work, we learned: There are songwriter rights, and there are master recording rights. They are separate. Both are valuable, and they are totally invisible to the end-user audience.

Embedded in Taylor’s journey is the key analogy for my journalism prediction: Just like songwriters, journalists have the right to own their creative output separate and apart from the right to publish and distribute that output.

It’s time for journalists to reclaim our creative rights.

For the uninitiated, in 2020 Swift was in a protracted battle over the rights to the first six albums she recorded. Her original distributor had sold the master recordings of those albums, even though she retained songwriter rights. Swift could buy the albums back but only if she recorded new albums as part of a new contract. She declined.

Journalism has long held that the rights to the journalism produced belong to the publisher. Simply, you report a story and write it up. The publisher distributes that story and makes money from it. In return, you get paid a salary and benefits and the publisher keeps the difference and all future uses to that story. The convenient narrative cover is that our industry is “mission-driven” and “no one gets into journalism for the money.”

The publisher-worker compact is unraveling in the age of AI and creators. And I believe our industry’s unraveling and response might echo parts of the music industry.

Reporters are becoming songwriters. Gen AI strips new facts down to the atomic unit and recombines those facts into articles and briefs. Some publishers are now just straight data businesses.

Creators are now the DJs, remixing facts to create their own music, sampling some from here and some from there, collaborating with TikTok duets and stitches. Echoing a Nieman prediction from 2024 by Bassey Etim with a creator economy wrinkle, I am quite excited about adding humanity and creativity back into the equation through creator journalism. In this new universe, audiences are increasingly following and loyal to the creators, not the publishers.

It’s a new model. And with a new model, we need a new conversation about ownership.

If you originate anything in our industry, be it fresh reporting, added context, or just a great headline, you deserve to own and keep rights associated with that work, no matter your primary employer.

Your work as a journalist of any stripe should follow you, not on some decayed archive page of a former employers’ website or in a painstaking “portfolio” site you haven’t updated in four years, but seamlessly and forever. The good news is that the technology is catching up: The fediverse makes this possible. Real Simple Licensing begins to standardize the relationship between your rights to your stories and an LLM. Decreasing the friction of ownership matters.

Just as the music industry figured out licensing of samples, lyrics and melodic patterns, journalism too must find a way through the legalities of who gets paid across a lot of different owners. It will be complicated and messy, but lawyers will negotiate and the money flows will ensure it gets built.

Forward-looking publishers will open up not just to straight revenue sharing but to actual ownership sharing first with “talent” then to the whole chain of talent support. Imagine a world where a single story, video or podcast gets divided up into points corresponding to revenue earned just like music and movies.

Where can journalism do better than the music industry? We can aim for something decentralized and cooperative, leapfrogging other industries like entertainment, sports and fashion which got to the creator economy earlier than we did.

My colleagues Liz Kelly Nelson, Justin Bank, and I are focused in 2026 on ensuring the shakeout of the “deal” for journalists ends in their favor. Because if we don’t own our own recordings and songwriter rights, then there are any number of less-than-kind actors willing to take them from us. It’s not a foregone conclusion that big tech will swoop in like Apple and Spotify did, but you can bet they’ll give it a shot, and I’d rather us get there first.

Oh, if you didn’t know the end of Swift’s story: She re-recorded her first six albums with the moniker “Taylor’s Version” affixed to the new master recordings, which her fans pumped up as the new and improved, streaming her way to chart-topping success years after the original debuted. I find it inspirational.