John Georges likes to tell you he got his start sweeping the floors of his grandfather’s business. He likes to tell you he watches both Fox News and CNN. He likes to tell you he rebuilt the Greek Orthodox church in New Orleans after Katrina, brought the shuttered Greek consulate back after 20 years and was made honorary consul — a title he likes to tell you he never asked for.
Because John Georges cares what people think.
He says so himself, freshly returned from his other home on the Greek island of Mykonos, in a conference room at the Imperial Trading Co. headquarters, the $2.5 billion enterprise his grandfather started. Behind him sit framed photos of himself with at least four U.S. presidents.
“I have to convince them that I look like a little guy, but I got a hundred million global audience in every country in the world,” he says.
Georges is speaking of Meta, and how their perception of him impacts his efforts to get AI licensing contracts with the tech giant — the type of deal he believes will “save journalism.”
Georges is co-owner, along with his wife Dathel Georges, of Georges Media Group, the state’s largest media organization and parent company of the state’s largest newspaper, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate. His interest in building a relationship with Meta became public this summer, when his media company co-hosted a celebratory dinner for Meta’s leadership alongside Gov. Jeff Landry and members of Congress.
In response to inquiries from Gulf States Newsroom and The Lens about whether the dinner and subsequent marketing campaign presented an ethical conflict for the newspaper, Georges gave a nearly three-hour interview that touched on everything from his love of Greek culture, his disdain for some local nonprofit newsrooms and management of his media company.
The conversation started with him saying he “wasn’t familiar” with the word “Hyperion” — the Greek titan who fathered the sun and the namesake of Meta’s data center. But Georges believes AI licensing contracts are the future of journalism, and he is angling to get there soon.
In the meantime, Georges Media co-hosted an elaborate dinner to celebrate Meta and made controversial ad purchases. Georges brushed aside concerns from several of his newspaper’s staffers and media critics who say his embrace of Meta blurs the line between the newsroom and the business side. Beyond sponsored content with the tech company, at least one column critiquing the company’s relationship with Meta was killed by the newspaper’s management, staffers say.
Asked about the spiked column, Georges said, “When it came to me, I said, this is nothing that we need to really care one way or the other about because there’s nothing there,” and reasserted that advertising does not influence the newspaper’s coverage.
Georges embraces AI contracts to ‘save journalism’
Georges bought The Advocate in 2013, and then The Times-Picayune in 2019. To rally the business, he embraced new strategies, like establishing a metered paywall for digital articles and returning the Times-Picayune print edition to daily editions that cover all of Louisiana.
In the acquisition, he also immediately laid off the entire 161-person staff of NOLA.com, the joint web platform of the Times-Picayune and the Advocate. Roughly 10 journalists and 12 other staffers ended up at the Advocate. Georges said the papers’ number of employees across the five outlets under Georges Media Group has declined under his tenure by two-thirds, to around 450. His retention strategy is for Times-Picayune staff to be “overpaid so you didn’t leave” and get “bonuses every year.” The usual Christmas bonus, staff reporters said, is a gift card for Rouses Supermarkets.
“We’re surviving because we rolled up the whole state,” he said.
But times are tough for the news industry. The Sunday circulation of The Times-Picayune | New Orleans Advocate today is about 25% less than the Sunday circulation of The Advocate in 2015.
“We still have print product, so we still have revenue coming in,” he says, and thanks to print advertising “we have what you would call a longer runway than most outlets.”
The nonprofit news model, he believes, is a doomed one. “I think the money’s going to run out for the non-profits and I’m gonna be the inheritor and the savior of that group.”
Yet the hardest recent hit to the newspaper business comes from AI. Because of AI summaries available on search results, web traffic has plunged. The old digital advertising model is unraveling. Major news agencies are laying off staff, sometimes using AI to replace human reporters. Tech platforms, including Meta, train their models by scraping newspaper content without compensation, siphoning off readership.
Some of his colleagues, Georges noted, are angling to sue. But Georges embraces change.
AI licensing contracts “will save journalism,” he said. “It’s the fair thing to do, and it will give us a way to survive. And I think that’s the way of the future.”
Such contracts, like the $150 million deal signed this year by News Corp, mean Meta pays for the right to use the newspaper’s articles to feed and train its AI systems, rather than scraping that content for free.
“My goal is to convince them” that Louisiana’s paper of record is worthy of the same kind of lucrative contract, he said.
He’s been chasing that goal for more than a year, watching other major news outlets sign licensing contracts with tech companies while he and his newspaper waited their turn. Georges wants Meta to treat him like a “big boy” and offer him one of those deals.
“Put me in the game, coach,” he said.
Gametime for Georges came when he got a call from author and biographer Walter Isaacson earlier this summer, who told him Meta was hosting a dinner ahead of the then-unannounced expansion of its data center project. He had to get involved. More than that, he needed Georges Media to host.
‘What’s not to celebrate?’
Georges got the dinner moved from Baton Rouge to Galerie de Galatoire in New Orleans, one of the restaurants he partly owns. His name is the first word on the invitation: “Georges Media Group and Meta invite you to a special evening,” a line that hangs above the names of Gov. Jeff Landry and U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise. In every official photograph taken at the event, his media company’s logo and Meta’s appear side-by-side.
The invitation’s fine print at the bottom read, “Meta shares your commitment to the highest standards of ethics and transparency.”
When asked in the recent interview why he didn’t simply attend as himself rather than folding in his company’s name, Georges said he wouldn’t “diminish the brand of the media” by keeping it uninvolved. And he objected to questions about his role as co-host.
“You don’t think I’m worthy enough to be the guy?” he asked. “I’m not a guy who’s going to sit in the audience.”
For Georges, all the glitz and glam was an excuse to put himself in the room with Meta’s president and vice chairman, Dina McCormick.
“I wanted to meet her. I wanted to get on her radar,” he said. “To build a relationship with the president of the biggest company in the world.” Meta is the largest digital advertising company in the world, and the 10th-largest overall.
Georges affirmed the dinner was a celebration of Meta.
“They’re investing $50 billion,” he said. “What’s not to celebrate about $50 billion in our community?”
The guest list included a sampling of officials and executives whose handling of Meta and its Louisiana project has raised questions: Gov. Landry, under fire for his administration’s widespread use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), who separately signed his own NDA with Meta, as reported by the Gulf States Newsroom; Rep. Julia Letlow, later revealed by a Gulf States Newsroom investigation to have traded Meta stock after signing her own NDA with the company; and executives from Entergy, the utility company seeking to build 10 new gas plants to power Hyperion.
Weeks after the dinner, the Louisiana Public Service Commission overturned a ruling that would have forced Meta to disclose job and power usage data. An Entergy executive was the ghostwriter of an LPSC motion in Meta’s favor last year, as reported by Gulf States Newsroom.
Georges brought his company’s publisher, Kevin Hall, to the dinner along with a couple of the newspaper’s editorial team: Rene Sanchez, the editor-in-chief, and Jerry DiColo, the managing editor. According to Georges, before the event got underway, business reporter Stephanie Riegel dropped in to interview Meta executives about the company’s data center expansion that would be announced the following day.
But the event itself was only covered by Nell Nolan in the paper’s social column: “The felicitous occasion was the announcement of Meta’s increased investment in our state,” Nolan wrote.
‘The truth business’
Weeks later, four sponsored-content videos began appearing on the Instagram and Facebook pages of Nola.com. In them, a Georges Media sales manager travels to Richland Parish, site of the 3,200-acre data center — “invited,” the reels say, by Meta — to interview local business owners about the data center’s benefits.
A “sponsored by Meta” label appears at the bottom of each video for a few seconds, then fades. Previous sponsored content videos with other companies on the paper’s social feeds have kept their sponsor’s logo visible throughout.
The substance and tone of the videos do not resemble what reporters covering the project on the ground – including those from Georges’ own newspaper – have heard.
In interviews, some residents of Richland Parish have said they didn’t know about the NDA-shrouded deal until construction began. Truck traffic and crashes have grown severe enough to shut down the local elementary school’s playground; Entergy is suing residents and using eminent domain to put in transmission lines for Meta; and land prices and rents are climbing, effectively displacing some families.
Reacting to the videos, Holly Ridge resident Makayla Johnese, who lives next to the construction site and whose children attend the local elementary school, said the “economic boost” narrative doesn’t match her experience.
“It for sure hasn’t helped me out any,” she said.
Asked what she thought of a media company partnering with Meta to run sponsored content promoting the project, she said she wasn’t surprised: “It’s all about the money when it comes down to it.”
Georges brushed off Holly Ridge residents’ concerns, saying “there’s always someone to complain.”
“It’s change. Oh come on, if you’re living on a street where there’s no traffic and birds are flying, there’s nothing going on, guess what? You have to share the world with the rest of the people,” he said, making a comparison to complaints about overtourism near his home in Greece.
“I live in Mykonos, the beaches were empty, and there was no one on them, and now there are people and clubs and music and all the people there are like, ‘They shouldn’t be here.’”
He believes that Meta’s project is helping locals and he’s optimistic about its effects on the state. Though the newspaper has reported that the $470 million cost of certain transmission lines and substations supporting the Meta project will fall to Louisiana ratepayers, Georges believes that Meta’s investments will fix the state’s electric grid, and that Meta is “paying 99% of it.” And though his newspaper has reported about water usage concerns, he believes they are a debunked myth.
Georges frames Nola.com’s marketing videos as a normal example of native advertising, pointing to an ongoing social media series sponsored by LCMC Health, and said Meta bought the ad on a rushed, 30-day turnaround rather than the usual three-to-six-month lead time, landing it in placements “you’re not normally used to seeing.”
Many in his newsroom are more wary about the relationship, staffers told The Lens and Gulf States Newsroom in interviews. The sponsored Meta content received a different reception from readers and was set up differently when compared with other Advocate video ads, they say.
The first video drew backlash in the comments. It was taken down and reposted with comments disabled. The three that followed never allowed comments at all. That decision appears unique to the Meta ads.
The unease felt by some reporters over the sponsored posts came to a head at an August “town hall” at the paper’s St. Charles Avenue office. Hall called the meeting, and according to multiple staffers who spoke to Gulf States Newsroom and The Lens, he appeared visibly uncomfortable for nearly an hour as reporters pressed him on specifics: Who approved the sponsored content videos? Why were comments disabled on only those videos?
Staffers said one reporter at the town hall reviewed roughly a year of sponsored posts from more than a dozen other advertisers and found none with comments disabled. In contrast, a viral April video of a reporter being attacked by a crow still carries sexist and antisemitic comments aimed at the reporter.
News reporters cited the barrier set up between traditional newsrooms and their advertising departments as they asked about the bigger picture. What are the clear boundaries when the company’s advertising department has developed what some staffers called a “concerning” partnership with a trillion-dollar company while its newsroom is trying to hold that same company and state officials accountable?
Hall did not answer specific questions for this story but said in a statement that he takes seriously the responsibility to separate the company’s advertising partnerships from its journalism. Recently, the media company released new internal standards for how the company labels and treats sponsored video content.
“Our commercial relationship with Meta and our hundreds of advertising customers never influences what our journalists cover,” he wrote.
Sanchez also did not respond to specific questions. In a statement, he said he’s never felt pressure to cover Meta in a particular way.
“As journalists, we all know we’re in the truth business, and that won’t change,” Sanchez wrote.
‘Not afraid of the sun’
In his interview, Georges’ answer to nearly every version of the conflict-of-interest question is a list of some of the newspaper’s previous event partnerships. The Saints. The CEO of Ochsner. Tom Benson, a man his own paper once savaged before Georges partnered with him.
“You think they [Meta] are any different than anyone else?”
When it’s suggested that Meta’s scale, and its stake and influence in state and federal policy, might differ in kind from a hospital system or a football team, he reframes the premise:
“What if they were the greatest corporation in the world?”
When asked about newsroom staff discontent, Georges said he suspects that any reporters who expressed concerns are not senior enough to “know what’s going on” and “they haven’t been doing it long enough to understand.”
Meta’s own posture toward this story echoed the confidence Georges has in his own account. Andy Stone, the company’s vice president of communications, offered one line in response to detailed questions about Meta’s relationship with Georges Media: “Meta has developed sponsorship opportunities with media companies for well over a decade.”
He then texted, four times, pushing for this story to include favorable depictions of the Meta data center.
“Can you confirm you’ll note some of these positives in the piece?” Stone texted shortly after sending the brief statement.
The Meta executive then called the reporter and, for about five minutes, continued to push for positive coverage of Meta within this story on the company’s influence on news coverage.
Stone stated that omitting the positives would “call into question” whether this story, and the news outlets themselves, are fair, and pointed to Richland Parish teacher bonuses as an example of the project’s benefits. This year, certified teachers in the parish received up to $50,000 bonuses paid for by increased tax revenue linked to the Meta project. Meta has also received a 100% exemption from local and state sales tax for most data center costs.
Media ethicists see the arrangement differently than Georges and Meta.
Dan Axelrod, who chairs the ethics committee for the Society of Professional Journalists, says audiences reasonably find it “deeply disturbing” to see a news outlet’s own platforms host what looks like cheerleading for a project the outlet is supposed to be covering from an accountability perspective. He also expressed doubts about Georges’ hope that revenue from AI licensing contracts will “save journalism.”
“The Times Picayune’s belief in AI ironically parallels the promise of data centers themselves,” Axelrod said. “Newspapers should be looking inside big tech’s bags, not carrying them.”
Ed Wasserman, a journalism ethics professor, goes further: nothing obligated the paper to run the ad campaign at all. “It would be within the Times-Picayune’s rights to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to run this stuff.’”
Dan Kennedy, who studies local news economics at Northeastern, is more measured: sponsored content itself isn’t damning. The real test, he argues, is whether ownership “has the integrity and the courage to really maintain a strict wall of separation,” — a test he says the dinner complicates by putting editors in the room beside the publisher.
While his newsroom’s internal policies may change, Georges will stay the course in his pursuit of Meta’s attention.
“You think we’re getting a little too close to Meta?” Georges asked. “I’m not afraid of the sun. You know — Icarus? I’ll get as close to the sun as I can.”
This story was published in collaboration with The Lens. The Gulf States Newsroom is a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
