Jodie Hopperton, head of INMA’s Product & Tech Initiative and curator of last week’s Media Tech & AI Week in San Francisco, hosted a live edition of “The Debrief” podcast to unpack what news media must do now as the Internet rapidly moves from the “search era” through the “answer era” and into the “action era.”

At the end of five days of programming, including a three-day study tour and two-day conference, Hopperton sat down with the moderators of the conference portion of the week: Robert Whitehead, head of the INMA Digital Platform Initiative, and Nicki Purcell, chief technology officer at Morgan’s.

The podcast was recorded on stage Friday in front of hundreds of attendees as a wrap-up for the week.

Five important takeaways:

1. Protect core journalism while learning the new AI Web

News organisations should protect the bulk of their original content from scraping by large language models and their proxies, while keeping limited visibility to Google and Gemini during this transition period. Run small, controlled experiments to see how generative and agentic search engines interpret, rank and reuse your work.

The goal is to learn quickly, determine the right balance between visibility and protection, and defend the long-term value of your intellectual property. Visibility matters, but scarcity is what creates value.

2. Unite behind collective licensing standards

The path forward is not through one-off AI content deals that only a few large publishers can secure. The solution is collective. Support shared, non-profit licensing frameworks such as RSL and others that align with INMA’s Basic Principles for News Media.

These models recognise journalism’s worth and aim to distribute compensation fairly and efficiently across the industry. By moving together under a common standard, news organisations can create a fair marketplace that rewards trusted sources and removes the frustration of fragmented negotiations.

3. Build shared tech foundations, not isolated experiments

The media industry must stop reinventing the wheel. Every publisher and broadcaster is building its own small tests, tools and frameworks, which wastes time and resources.

Instead, pool efforts to create open protocols, shared testing environments, and blueprints for core AI-driven publishing technologies. Follow the model of science and software, where collaboration and open-source development accelerate progress.

Shared foundations will allow professional media to move faster, reduce costs, and strengthen independence in a rapidly changing tech ecosystem.

4. Fix data, free teams, and scale AI

Before AI can deliver value, data must be clean, structured, tagged and ready for both discoverability and monetisation in the agentic Web.

Organisations need to democratise access to AI tools, upskill teams quickly, and move from cautious pilots to broad internal mobilisation. This includes not only editorial operations but also corporate and commercial functions.

The next three months are critical. Readiness now will decide who thrives and who falls behind as AI scales across the media business.

5. Lead the content revolution

The future of journalism lies in a liquid content model that flows across every surface, device, and format.

• Create distinctive, human stories that adapt easily to text, audio, video, and interactive experiences.
• Focus first on your owned networks and selectively distribute through platforms that help audience discovery.
• Move away from fixed ideas about article length, format or tone.

Uniqueness and brand experience are what endure. They are the qualities that will define trusted journalism in both the human web and the agentic web.

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