For its first Webinar of the new year, INMA upheld its tradition of providing a look at the successes of the previous year and, importantly, the challenges and opportunities ahead.

During Aspirations and Inspirations: What News Media Will Achieve in 2026, INMA’s Executive Director and CEO Earl Wilkinson looked at the future, asking INMA President and Mediahuis CEO Gert Ysebaert to outline what the industry should expect in 2026. 

What lies ahead

Ysebaert predicted another year of change and disruption for the news media industry. Although he is a veteran of the industry, Ysebaert noted the level of disruption experienced today is unlike anything seen before.

“I think this disruption is kind of unseen because of the speed at which it is going, the impact, but also the uncertainty,” Ysebaert said. “So it is really uncertain where it is going.”

He pointed to the massive investment flowing into AI companies and questioned whether 2026 would be the year those investments finally deliver the results they’ve promised: “We see the importance growing of AI, but will it really be the breakthrough year where we really see a big change in our industry?”

At the same time, Ysebaert pointed to the mounting geopolitical instability and the erosion of support for freedom of the press, even in long‑standing democracies. That raises concerns about the future of independent journalism. The combination of technological and political volatility, he said, created a “real momentum” that would define the year ahead.

The challenge of change

When Wilkinson asked about the biggest risk facing publishers, Ysebaert said the danger is in underestimating the scale of change. Many publishers, he said, still believe they can survive by optimising existing processes rather than rethinking their business models.

“We really need to redesign our operational model,” he said, adding that publishers often underestimate the pace of AI’s impact and remain blind to how younger audiences consume media. Formats that served legacy audiences well, he said, are “not fit anymore” for emerging generations: “It’s not the younger generations who will change. It’s ourselves.”

The collapse of referral traffic from Google and social platforms is one of the most significant challenges facing publishers, Ysebaert said. While the decline happened more slowly than expected in 2025, he said publishers should now operate as if that traffic “is gone.”

He urged publishers to focus on building direct relationships with audiences both on external and owned platforms. Instead of being viewed as partners or enemies, platforms should be treated as “unreliable and unpredictable infrastructure,” and publishers must understand they will continue to change and evolve.

“So instead of relying on the traffic coming from platforms, let’s invest directly in those relationships,” Ysebaert suggested.

Whilst legacy audiences already know the brand and have established habits, younger audiences do not. “They live on other platforms,” he said. “They don’t come automatically to our Web sites or apps.”

Owning discovery, he said, means building brand recognition and trust where younger audiences already are, building relationships that eventually lead them back to owned platforms.

“It’s not about being found,” he said. “It’s about being chosen.”

The AI advantage

When it comes to AI, Ysebaert said the real competitive advantage will not come from using AI as a tool but rather harnessing it to transform decision‑making, monetisation, and customer experience. “Make it the engine of data-driven decisions,” he recommended.

AI could improve monetisation by personalising which subscription offers customers see and which ads they view — something that also improves the experience and outcomes for advertisers. AI-powered customer experiences that deliver journalism in the right format, channel, and moment will differentiate which news organisations succeed.

“Journalism will always be made by humans, but AI can help us to present that journalism in the formats and the channel and at the moment that the user wants it,” he explained. “So it can also really drive a consumer experience. And the publishers that are capable of doing that, I think they will be the winners.”

The new subscription model

Despite industry scepticism, Ysebaert said there is still “headroom” for digital subscription growth. The challenge is that growth will no longer come from “subscribing to a generic news service” but will be rooted in relevance.

Future subscription success, he said, will depend on niche offerings, new formats such as audio, video, and explainers, habit‑building services, and experiences tailored to younger audiences. Younger readers do not have the habits that sustained print subscribers for decades, he said. Publishers must build new ones.

“What do people really want? What do they expect? Bring it in the format that they want, which is definitely not only written articles,” he suggested. “Building subscriptions will be reinstalling new habits, and that will not be by what we’ve done before.”

With declining traffic and rising AI‑generated content, Ysebaert said brand strength is becoming more important than ever. But brand today is not a logo; it is an experience.

“People are overwhelmed by information,” he said, which leads them to seek out signals of trust. Increasingly, those signals come from personalities, not institutions: “It is really the people that make the brand, people in the newsroom that make the brand, and these people need to be visible. The human factor is what will distinguish us from AI.”

Ysebaert praised INMA’s new Young Audiences Initiative and said publishers must redesign news for how younger people form habits and trust. Articles repurposed for Web sites and apps are not enough. Young audiences want short‑form video, audio, visual explainers, and personality‑driven formats.

To learn how to serve them, Mediahuis launched a new brand in the Netherlands called Spill, designed with monetisation and trust‑building at its core.

“Monetisation is something that we think, ‘Oh, as long as we reach them, one day they will come to a platform and they will pay.’”

But it’s not that simple. “We have to think about the monetisation from the beginning and not focus on scale,” he said. “Focus first on building trust, building a relationship, and from that relationship, expand and grow further.”

Looking ahead, Ysebaert said advertising is not disappearing but evolving. Publishers must shift from volume to value by automating common processes, using first‑party data to create trusted environments, and re‑educating advertisers about the value of news contexts. The industry must work together to strengthen local advertising ecosystems, he said.

When Wilkinson asked what INMA members need most in 2026, Ysebaert said the answer is execution support. “We don’t make the difference with strategy,” he said. “We make the difference with execution.” He also said INMA must help defend independent journalism — editorially, technologically, and financially. “Independency and resilience,” he said, “are the core concepts we need to think about.”

INMA’s growth

Wilkinson also spent time detailing what he described as one of the most transformative years in the association’s 96‑year history.

Membership has grown to nearly 25,000 people across more than 1,000 media companies in 92 countries — a number that emphasises a significant accomplishment: “If I were to look at the totality of last year, what I would say to you is that INMA, I believe, made journalism more relevant and more accessible,” Wilkinson said.

A major part of INMA’s progress in 2025, Wilkinson said, came from its investment in building a comprehensive, multimedia knowledge ecosystem. Audio and video recordings, PDFs, blogs, and research reports were all integrated into the new AskINMA answer engine, a proprietary small language model trained exclusively on INMA content.

The tool has transformed the membership experience by enabling INMA to “create value in ways we’ve never before done,” Wilkinson said. He also highlighted INMA’s six global initiatives, each of which he said “told a profound story” about the industry’s direction.

INMA’s subscription benchmark service, now with more than 300 brands, has become the largest cohort of its kind in the industry, and Wilkinson said the newly launched financial benchmark service aims to do what “no other organisation has ever been able to do internationally.”

The picture he painted of 2025 was one of growth, embracing AI’s tools, and helping members navigate a changing landscape. INMA has become more tuned into members’ needs and more determined to provide them with proven, practical solutions.

“We know who we are. We know who we aren’t,” Wilkinson said. “We focus on what works and, frankly, what doesn’t work. Guessing has just become too expensive for our membership base and the pace of change is just too much.”

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