News organisations are rethinking how they define and communicate their brands as trust becomes harder to earn in a fragmented, AI-driven media environment.

At the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit, speakers made clear that branding is no longer rooted in institutional authority alone. Instead, it is increasingly built on consistency, transparency, and the visibility of individual journalists.

Jakub Górnicki, co-founder of Outriders in Poland, presented his review of 4,000 media campaigns from INMA archives. Mark Campbell, chief marketing officer of the U.S.-based Hearst Newspapers, and Kerstin Hasse, lead of the INMA Young Audiences Initiative, joined him to share a central message emerged: News brands must actively explain their value — and do so through people.

From assumed trust to earned trust

Górnicki grounded the discussion in a deep review of INMA’s archive of news marketing and branding campaigns. That analysis — spanning decades of campaigns — revealed branding in news has always evolved alongside shifts in technology and distribution.

“When I started to dig it … I realised there is a bigger story here,” he said. “What I realised is that this is a story about a very complicated relationship journalism has with trust.”

In earlier eras, trust was embedded in the product itself, Górnicki said: “It was invisible. It was assumed. We didn’t have to think about it.”

As new platforms emerged, that assumption eroded. Branding evolved from simple slogans to more deliberate storytelling aimed at differentiation.

Today, that shift has accelerated. Journalism competes not only with other publishers but with creators, platforms, and AI-generated content.

“Meaning matters,” Górnicki said, noting human storytelling carries weight in ways machine-generated content cannot. “Authenticity matters … . If you kind of feel true, people trust you.”

The conclusion from decades of branding evolution is clear: Trust is no longer assumed — it must be earned and explained.

Consistency and clarity in brand messaging

Consistency in brand messaging is no longer just a marketing principle — it is critical to how audiences understand and value journalism.

In a fragmented discovery environment, audiences encounter news across multiple platforms, formats, and personalities. That makes coherence across touchpoints — from marketing campaigns to product experience to the presence of journalists on social platforms — essential to building recognition and trust.

Górnicki’s review of INMA’s branding archives showed that as trust has eroded over time, the role of messaging has shifted fundamentally. Where news brands once relied on reputation alone, they must now actively explain what they do, how they do it, and why it matters.

At the same time, Hearst’s approach illustrates how consistency can be scaled without losing relevance — using shared campaign frameworks while tailoring messaging to individual markets and journalists.

For subscription-focused publishers, the implication is direct: Inconsistent messaging creates friction in the funnel, while clarity and alignment across editorial, product, and marketing reinforce value and improve conversion and retention.

Hearst builds brands through journalists

Campbell discussed Hearst’s investment in brands, which he discussed in an INMA master class in November. Based on that experience, Hearst is shifting away from institutional brand promotion toward journalist-led storytelling, Campbell said.

“The way we’re trying to really focus on how we are different and relevant is by focusing more on the journalists who are creating the content that helps our readers live their lives,” he said.

Audiences, he argued, increasingly connect with individuals rather than faceless organisations: “This is more of a people-to-people game than a faceless content campaign.”

Hearst combines consistency with localisation, using shared campaign structures tailored to specific markets and journalists.

“The content is really specific to that city … and the journalists who are expert within that region,” he said.

The model signals a broader shift: Scale comes from systems, but differentiation comes from people.

Younger audiences require transparency

Hasse reinforced that trust must now be demonstrated — especially for younger audiences who have not grown up with strong relationships to news brands.

“The idea is that you build trust with your audience by showing them how you are doing your journalism,” she said.

Transparency and visibility are essential to building that trust: “The fact that we show what you're doing is essential.”

She pointed to the rise of creator-style journalism as a model for engagement, where reporters openly show their process, sources, and decisions.

“That is something that newsrooms can copy from the way creator journalists are working so easily,” she said.

For publishers, this represents a shift from authority to explanation — and from brand as identity to brand as experience.

Key takeaways

Discussion by Górnicki, Campbell, and Hasse left attendees with these lessons learned:

• In the world of AI, news companies need to differentiate from the “sea of sameness,” as Górnicki said.
• News companies can’t assume trust is granted. They must tell the story why people should trust them — who they are, how their journalism is different from the content out there; why and how journalism is delivering on it.
• News brand messaging should be consistent across the funnel stages. Górnicki noticed that brands say different things to people when they position their brands in advertising and different when people come on site and hit a paywall;
• In the world of creators, people trust people, so one way to differentiate is to tell the brand story through people behind the brand like journalists.

Photos by Robert Downs Photography.

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