I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions of what is abundant and what is scarce in an AI-mediated information ecosystem. Information, which news publishers carefully controlled for centuries, is now abundant. What, then, is scarce?

As news publishers, where does our competitive advantage lie? What is it that we provide that is truly valuable — and how does that shape our newsrooms’ content strategy?

It looks like I am not the only one who is thinking about this. After decades of scaling up content production (at the behest of the advertising department), many newsrooms are now coming to the conclusion that producing more content is not the path to financial sustainability and that less is more.

For example, The Times in the UK has cut the number of stories it publishes by 25% — and seen “three consecutive months of all-time, record-breaking audience growth.”

How do they decide where to focus? They follow a five-point strategy:

• Exclusive, original, unique reporting. 

• Telling big developing stories as they happen.

• “How can we add value and make a story distinct to The Times, even if it’s already out there or broken by a competitor?”

• Using data to keep pace with interest in a long-running story, to check the audience is still engaged, and assess what exactly they want from it “rather than just trying to fill print pages.”

• Making it clear to the reader why they should click through, based on the headline, image, etc.

In other words, their focus is shifting to distinctiveness and relevance. They are favouring quality over quantity.

“If your content can be summarised in three bullet points by an AI, it is a commodity. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of evergreen content has been cannibalised and its traffic for many publishers has tanked,” said Damian Radcliffe, a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon.

“In response, many media companies need to simply produce less content and ensure that what they are doing is better. Content needs to be more meaningful. More impactful. More distinctive. Can it help to drive a conversion — in the form of a registration, a newsletter signup, or a subscription — so that audiences come to you first and not their AI platform of choice? (And if not, should you be doing it at all?)”

It reminds me of something I heard years ago: The news business does not have a finance problem — it has a focus problem.

Not all content is equally vulnerable to AI summarisation. Sites that prioritise original storytelling, exclusive imagery, and strong visuals can still thrive, Radcliffe points out.

Similarly, Swiss media giant Ringier Media has decided we have to think of the end user of news if we want to provide value.

“The media industry does not have a content problem. It has a value problem,” Ringier Media Switzerland CEO Ladina Heimgartner said. “Editorial pipelines are optimised for volume. Commercial models are optimised for inventory. Organisations are optimised for internal alignment. Very little is optimised for actual user intent.

“We produce what is easy to produce — not necessarily what is worth producing … . As long as organisations optimise for reach metrics disconnected from value, they will continue to scale irrelevance.

“The organisations that thrive in the AI era will not necessarily be those who produce more content. They will be those who allocate their resources more effectively. The organisations best prepared will invest in journalists who build trust around specific user needs while holding the civic mission; in product teams who create experiences that convert intent into action; and in partnerships that extend the ecosystem without surrendering editorial sovereignty.”

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Header photo: Adobe Stock: Good Studio.

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