I’m recently back from the INMA World Congress in New York, where I heard many brilliant speakers share their insights with us over five days during study tours, the main conference and four seminars, as well as informally over food and drink. 

Two topics that came up frequently were differentiation and human connection:

Differentiation

As Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones, said: Traffic is a terrible word because it refers to an anonymous swarm descending upon your Web site and disappearing equally quickly. Audience is what we should care about — the people who come to us because we offer them something of value. 

We need to differentiate between the two.

Against the backdrop of dwindling search referral traffic due to AI overviews, this has never been more true. 

As news brands, we can no longer be all things to all people. This leads us to a second type of differentiation, this time in the content that we provide — where we need to think about the value exchange with our digital audience and focus more sharply on what it is that we provide them with that they truly value.

As Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, said: “We need to keep the high intent users. I don’t mind if we lose 90% of Google traffic but we keep the 10% who are most likely to subscribe.” 

Human connection

One theme that popped up time and aInternet contains an abundance of content (both human-generated and AI-generated), where 200-year-old news organisations are competing with content creators on YouTube and TikTok, why would anyone prefer to go to content on your Web site or app?

Gerold Riedmann, editor-in-chief of Der Standard in Austria, told us that 40% of the engagement with his news brand was on user-generated content, such as comments and on forums that users created themselves. 

People want to connect with other people. Readers return not only for the content but also to interact with other members of the community.

We heard from Noor Tagouri, a young, award-winning journalist who is now exclusively on social media as a content creator. She spoke of the need for authenticity and urged us to expand our definition of storytelling.

AI actually makes it easier to do this. We can present our content in many formats — whether it is text, audio, vertical video, infographics or animation — at a very low marginal cost. It helps us show new audiences that we are relevant to them.

An additional benefit is this: In a world flooded with AI-generated “slop,” the value of hearing from a trusted voice is magnified. Humans trust other humans. Any news organisation with trusted, credible columnists and reporters, with distinctive voices and opinions, has an advantage because they possess something scarce that cannot be easily replaced by generic AI-generated summaries. 

We need to leverage this.

Agents

How will AI agents change the world in which our media businesses operate? 

At the moment, your Web site contains pages with content and advertisements on the assumption that the person who comes to read the content may see the ad, might click on it, and perhaps will even buy something. 

In the future, though, you may have one agent summarising the news for you and another one doing your shopping. This will mean we need to design our user experience differently — and we may need to reconsider our revenue models entirely.

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