News leaders from across Europe gathered this week at the INMA Newsroom Innovation Hub in Dublin, part of INMA’s Media Innovation Week, to exchange strategies for navigating one of the most turbulent periods in modern journalism. 

Over two days at The Irish Times, Hub participants traded ideas, drilled into useful case studies, and pressed each other on their biggest challenges and takeaways. 

Discussions centred on five big themes: 

• Redefining success through data.

• Adopting user-needs frameworks and audience-first thinking.

• Integrating AI and automation into newsroom routines.

• Confronting the growing dominance of platforms and creators.

• Responding to the urgency of the moment.

The INMA Newsroom Innovation Hub was hosted by The Irish Times and featured an inside look at its newsroom, including a guided tour. Designed for hands-on learning, the Hub brought together editors, product and audience leads to swap practical tactics on workflow, data, and AI-driven storytelling.

Participants saw how The Irish Times organises its daily news operation and innovation pipeline, then compared notes in focused discussions. The result: concrete ideas to take back home and momentum for ongoing collaboration across INMA’s community.

The sessions revealed a sector under pressure but not without direction. From Sweden to Denmark, publishers are experimenting with analytics dashboards, subscription metrics, AI assistants, and cultural change programmes in an effort to secure journalism’s future.

Keynote speaker Jess Awtry, vice president of digital strategy and communications at Pew Research Center in the United States, cited two big insights from the Hub.

“The data is shouting at us: Creators are to news Web sites what news Web sites once were to print,” Awtry said. “We can’t underestimate the seismic impact and speed at which this is changing.

“If you’re under 30, social is where you’re getting your news, and our foundation in facts needs to be part of that diet. News outlets can’t afford to be late on another trend. Whether it’s best to build our own news influencers or partner with existing stars has yet to be seen. It’ll take all new muscles, but we should know by now that avoiding it is increasingly not an option.”

Awtry said she was struck by the attention and resources focused on print at many media organisations:

“The audience perked up around print production automation. It’s clearly a challenge many smaller operations are facing. At a time when resources are so valuable, using AI to speed up print production to allow teams to focus on digital is still a problem waiting for better solutions.”

From print-centric to audience-first

One of the clearest themes was the ongoing shift from legacy print workflows to audience-first strategies. While most publishers have been talking about “digital-first” for more than a decade, many admitted their practices still revolved around repurposing print content for online platforms.

Sidney Gennies, deputy editor at Der Tagesspiegel in Germany, acknowledged that simply moving articles online created reach but not deeper loyalty. Their current focus is on identifying user needs and reshaping content to meet them rather than replicating a newspaper in digital form.

The Irish Times newsroom team also presented a sharp example. Research showed women aged 30-45 represent a significant share of readers but rarely subscribed. Instead of treating the audience as one homogenous group, they restructured the commissioning processes to explicitly target distinct audience segments. Reporters and editors are now asked at the outset who a piece is for, what is unique about it, and how the intended audience can see themselves reflected in coverage.

These efforts point to a broader redefinition of strategy. “Digital-first” has become insufficient. What publishers are building now is “audience-first” — a newsroom structure that begins with the needs, habits, and identities of readers rather than the rhythms of print production.

Redefining success through data

If audience-first strategies describe the “why,” then metrics describe the “how.” Several sessions focused on the need to rethink newsroom KPIs, moving away from broad reach success metrics to loyalty and engagement.

Mediahuis, the Belgium-based group with operations across Europe, considers “subscriber engagement time” as its North Star metric. Rather than counting visits or conversions alone, the group measures how long subscribers spend with its content, said Yves Van Dooren, business partner/data and insights. This allows newsrooms to balance reach with depth, encouraging distinctive reporting rather than chasing pageviews.

Troels Jørgensen, digital director at Politiken in Denmark, took participants into a live deep-dive of Politiken’s own in-house platform. The dashboards are integrated directly into articles, allowing any journalist to click from their story into real-time performance data. Importantly, the system avoids league tables ranking reporters by traffic, reflecting Politiken’s belief that journalism is a collective endeavour.

Both examples illustrate the same underlying principle: Data should be accessible, actionable, and supportive of quality journalism. The old regime of static traffic lists and top-performer tables is giving way to systems that embed analytics into everyday routines while encouraging collaboration and curiosity.

User needs as an editorial compass

The adoption of user-needs frameworks emerged throughout the programme, underlining the growing momentum of the model, which categorises journalism by the specific purpose it serves — whether to explain, update, inspire, or help.

Der Tagesspiegel requires editors to assign a user need to every story pitch. Although initially not widely embraced by journalists, the exercise has gradually reshaped content commissioning and improved retention among readers, Gennies said. The process has also forced the newsroom to sharpen story purpose, avoiding articles that try to be everything at once.

The Irish Times has adapted the framework to add “involve me,” reflecting audiences’ demand for participation and representation. This addition acknowledges readers increasingly expect to be part of the conversation, not just consumers of information.

Meanwhile, Axel Springer has automated the classification process. Janis Kitzhofer, senior manager/editorial insights and development, talked about how AI tools review published stories to determine their actual user need – sometimes exposing a mismatch between editorial intention and outcome. This feedback loop allows the newsroom to adjust future commissioning based on evidence rather than assumption.

Together, these cases demonstrate user-needs thinking is becoming a common language for bridging editorial craft and business imperatives. It encourages journalists to frame their work more deliberately and helps managers align coverage with subscription goals.

AI as colleague, not competitor

No theme loomed larger than Artificial Intelligence. Rather than treating AI as a looming threat, many publishers are embedding it directly into workflows as a supportive colleague.

Bonnier News in Sweden has built its own AI hub to give employees access to multiple models and providers. On top of this sits Amelie, an editorial assistant embedded in the CMS and used daily by thousands of journalists. Felix Kallio, prompt engineering specialist at Bonnier News, showed how Amelie helps with drafting, summarising, and contextualising stories, while a shared prompt library allows staff to learn from each other’s instructions and outputs.

Axel Springer has been experimenting with bots. What began as crude alerts in Slack channels has evolved into predictive systems that anticipate subscription performance and recommend homepage adjustments in real time. By forecasting which premium stories are likely to underperform, the bots allow editors to redeploy digital real estate more effectively.

Ramona Adolf, head of digital at Waiblingen in Germany, described how automation is being used to free journalists from print tasks. AI systems now generate routine filler articles and adapt digital stories for print layouts, enabling reporters to focus on original reporting.

Across these cases, AI is framed not as a replacement for journalists but as an embedded assistant that reduces repetitive work, accelerates decision-making, and supports strategic goals.

The rising dominance of content creators

INMA’s Newsroom Innovation Hub focused heavily on content creators, including research on their growing popularity among younger news consumers and how legacy media brands should respond.

Research presented by Pew’s Jess Awtry highlighted the growing popularity of TikTok usage for news, noting more than half of people who use TikTok get news there. Social has overtaken search as the primary gateway to news, reversing long-standing audience acquisition strategies.

Jeremy Gilbert, Knight professor digital media strategy Medill/ Northwestern University in the United States, provided a preview of the upcoming NextGenNews report, noting a stark contrast between the news habits of younger and older people. Those over age 50 predominantly consume broadcast news, while those under 25 overwhelmingly prefer social media.

“Influencers are uniquely flexible in the value they provide,” Gilbert said.

This shift creates multiple pressures. First, publishers are losing direct access to audiences as platforms tighten their control over distribution. Second, readers are accustomed to consuming news from creators who present themselves with greater authenticity, transparency, and relatability. Surveys show audiences now rank kindness and authenticity alongside accuracy and intelligence as qualities they expect from journalism.

The News Movement is increasingly partnering with content creators, working collaboratively to identify and produce videos and other content, said Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Hutson. She acknowledged an initial resistance to working with news influencers, but said she’s now an evangelist for the practice.

Kerstin Hasse, who left legacy media to launch her own podcast and newsletter, challenged the room to take one action immediately when they return to their newsrooms:

• Find one journalist on your team who has a distinctive voice.

• Tell one story in a more personal and authentic way.

• Ask your audience one direct question (and use the answers for a story!).

• Try one new format.

For publishers, the growing dominance of creators as sources of news means audience-first strategies cannot stop at subscriptions and newsletters. They must also grapple with platforms they do not control, experiment with creator partnerships, and adapt storytelling styles to meet new expectations.

A shared direction

Despite differences in market size, language, and resources, the Dublin discussions revealed a convergence of strategy.

• Distinctiveness over commodification: News leaders emphasised the need to produce journalism that reflects the identity of each brand, whether through signature projects or unique investigations. Commodity news, easily summarised by AI or reproduced by competitors, will not sustain subscriptions.

• Engagement over clicks: Metrics are shifting from traffic counts to measures of attention and time spent, encouraging depth rather than volume.

• AI as infrastructure: From assistants to bots, AI is becoming an everyday layer in newsroom operations. It is less a disruptive shock than an invisible scaffold supporting efficiency and decision-making.

• Audience plurality over singular archetypes: Newsrooms are increasingly segmenting audiences, designing coverage for specific groups rather than assuming a single “typical reader.”

• Cultural change as the hardest task: Whether persuading journalists to adopt user-needs frameworks or protecting them from data overload, managers acknowledged human adaptation remains the most challenging part of transformation.

Lena K. Samuelsson, board member/Schibsted senior advisor and former publisher Sweden’s largest news brand Aftonbladet, spoke candidly about why the time for newsroom transformation is now — and what’s at stake if we don’t act with urgency. 

At the end, participants identified ideas they want to implement in their newsrooms and named the biggest obstacles they may face. 

Conclusion: Incremental progress in a time of upheaval

Journalism’s future will not be secured by any single tool or framework. Instead, as INMA’s Newsroom Innovation Hub showed, progress comes in increments: a newsroom freed from print routines, an assistant that automates prompts, a dashboard that measures attention rather than pageviews.

These innovations will not solve the wider crisis of trust, platform dominance, or declining ad revenue overnight. But they represent a shared trajectory toward newsrooms that are more adaptive, more deliberate, and more attuned to the audiences they serve.

The news industry may remain in flux, but the discussions in Dublin suggested a clear direction: Journalism that is audience-first, data-savvy, and AI-enabled.

Media Innovation Week continues through Friday.

Editor’s note: This article summarises, with the assistance of ChatGPT, original content created by created by INMA. All content has been reviewed and edited by INMA editors.

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