#35. Weekly AI For Newsroom Roundup. What if MCP matters more than GEO and AEO?

Hello, this is Sergei.

This week I shipped probably the biggest update to AI For Newsroom so far—both visually and in terms of new features.

The most interesting one actually appeared by accident: an MCP server. Now anyone can connect AI For Newsroom directly to Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor and chat with the entire database—find case studies, research papers, tools, reports, AI initiatives, or even ask it to prepare reports and presentations based on everything we’ve collected.

The more I experiment with MCP, the more I think it’s a highly underrated concept for news media. Right now we’re all talking about GEO, AEO, AI visibility, robots.txt, and trying to get our content into LLMs. That’s important, of course. But MCP offers a completely different approach: instead of waiting for AI to discover our journalism, we can bring our journalism directly into the AI tools readers already use.

I almost think of it as a new kind of newsletter. People subscribe to a newsletter to receive your journalism wherever they already spend time—in their inbox. MCP does something similar, except the destination is Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or whatever AI assistant they prefer. Once connected, your latest content is right there all the time.

And then there’s monetization.

I ran a small experiment to see whether an MCP server could inject additional context into an LLM’s responses. It turns out it can. In my case, Claude started including a simple call to action—“Subscribe to our newsletter”—at the end of relevant answers. You can’t fully control how an LLM uses the information you provide, so I’m still cautious about this idea, but it suggests that MCP could become much more than just another API. It could become a new distribution channel for journalism, a new source of audience insights, and eventually a new way to monetize news products.

Based on this I've made a ready-to-use solution to create MCP servers for news media — MCPlease, that can be installed on any servers. So just connect your newsroom archive, wrap it with OAuth 2.1, connect optional Stripe billing (if you want your MCP to be a premium feature), and analytics — then publish a live endpoint your readers paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor. Like it?