Hi there.

I’m writing this as I fly home to LA from New York, where I’ve spent the week at our World Congress of News Media — our flagship gathering of more than 600 media executives from over 40 countries. The energy of discussing the industry’s biggest challenges amid political and technological upheaval is electric.  

Between on-stage interviews with some of the sharpest minds in media, three themes kept surfacing around product and tech. Here’s what I’m taking home.

Also, we announced a partnership with OpenAI that I am really excited about; see here. It involves Webinars, closed-door workshops and US$1.5 million in OpenAI credits. If we don’t yet know who your AI lead is, please e-mail membership@INMA.org or contact me at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org. 

Thanks, Jodie

3 World Congress insights: mastering legacy digital and distribution for growth

As we explored in our March master class, putting people, not “traffic,” at the center of everything is more essential than ever. 

Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones, had an almost visceral reaction to the word “traffic” on stage during our interview, reminding us these are real customers, real people. It was both humbling and poignant to hear that from a company celebrating its best results ever.

It’s become clear that news businesses are now mostly three distinct parts:

1. The legacy business

Our print and cable operations still generate strong profits, but they’re undeniably in decline. 

We don’t discuss this much because most organisations already understand the trade-offs here. The focus is on efficiency and margin maximisation — automating print layouts, optimising distribution, squeezing every drop of value from existing subscribers — so we can free up resources for growth.

2. Core digital products

We’ve mastered the basics of our Web and app experiences, but perfection remains elusive. Now is the time to obsess over user journeys. 

Our platforms should showcase our journalism at its very best: clean, uncluttered, crystal-clear in purpose. As Condé Nast showed us, a decluttered interface drives engagement. We must choose a single call to action on each page — subscribe, click this ad, sign up for that newsletter — and resist the urge to ask users to do everything at once. 

Or as one exec succinctly said at the event: We shouldn’t have our internal struggles show up on our customers’ experience. And yes, intelligent personalisation plays into this to help users find what they need, when they need it.

3. New distribution paths

These channels aren’t always new, but they remain largely uncracked. Take an example Die Zeit’s CEO gave us about once of their brand extensions that garnered 30 million views but almost no revenue. 

The big questions persist: Which platforms deserve our focus? How can we reach younger, more diverse audiences authentically? And what sustainable business models — subscriptions, sponsorships, affiliate programmes — will underpin those efforts?

You know who nails this? Creators. They understand the power of story and the importance of marketing. Something we, as an industry of storytellers, have only just begun to prioritise.

On the study tour with my colleague Amalie Nash, we learned that some newsrooms now dedicate up to 5% of their resources just to promote their own work. At The Wall Street Journal, the editor and CMO are so aligned around this that marketers sit right alongside journalists, speeding up campaigns to keep pace with the newsroom’s breaking news cycle.

Ultimately, journalism itself is the product. Our mission is to deliver the best possible experience of that product on our own platforms: intuitive, seamless, and tailored. We must make it effortless for readers to discover, access, and consume the stories they need to stay informed.

Now more than ever, the world relies on structured, fact-based journalism that provides context, holds power to account, and — just as crucially — builds community. 

Almar’s warning still rings true: “These aren’t traffic metrics, they’re people.”

As I head home from World Congress, I’m carrying with me a renewed commitment to keep in mind that real humans are at the heart of every product, process, and platform decision we make.

Date for the diary: June 4 Webinar on AI content licensing 

Join me for Unlocking AI Content Licensing: Strategies from Dow Jones & The Guardian, where we’ll dig into how two industry leaders are:

• Leveraging AI for business efficiency without sacrificing value.

• Innovating products through targeted content partnerships.

• Navigating evolving consumer behaviours in AI-driven discovery.

• Structuring future-proof licensing deals that balance guarantees and growth.

I’ll be talking with Traci Mabrey, general manager at Factiva/Dow Jones, and Robert Hahn, director of business affairs and licensing at The Guardian. INMA members attend free. Sign up here. 

How CEOs wish they’d embraced AI sooner, and what you should do next 

Moderating a panel of CEOs from Gannett, McClatchy, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I asked them their biggest regret from the last year or two. I rarely like it when all panelists give the same response, but what struck me is that maybe every CEO would say this: I wish I’d acted on AI sooner. 

AI came up in nearly every discussion at World Congress. It’s no longer theoretical. It’s reshaping everything.

I break it down into four buckets:

1. Business efficiency was the most mentioned. There are mass efficiencies of scale as AI allows for repetitive tasks to be automated. This will show up all across the business from automated print layouts, media planning, marketing, summarising, headline writing, etc.

2. Product innovation as AI develops. This is the growth area. The obvious ones to note are personalisation of content and format, an area I suspect we’ll see more of over the next year. One example that jumped out to me was The New York Times’ brand match where it uses AI to help marketers quickly find the best content for their needs. Expect more inventive use cases to show up as initial experiments mature.

3. Changes to consumer behaviour is still an unknown. It’s now common wisdom that search is (in some markets) or will (in others) decrease and in some cases fairly rapidly. I’ve been told that publishers should prepare for near-zero search traffic within two years. Will answer engines replace search? Which new interfaces will emerge? And how wary will consumers become about AI-driven truth claims? We simply don’t know yet.

4. AI partnerships and licensing: During my 2.5-hour Product & Tech seminar with OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft, Tollbit, and Human Native, it became clear that deals vary wildly — and none are built to last. AI firms have lean teams. We heard from media execs that minimum guarantees are important. Perplexity still faces pushback over no/low ad revenues versus high content-placement risk. Meanwhile, many media outlets remain oblivious to where bots are scraping their work (blocking them is the first step). 

OpenAI kind of announced announced that ChatGPT intends to integrate media subscriptions and let users set source preferences. I say “kind of” because it’s in development and not in production with any idea of release. I found this promising as it seems there are serious conversations about how subscription content might be presented in AI answers, including layout and branding. 

So what should media leaders do now? I asked Madhav Chinappa and Josh Stone, both tech veterans now at AI startups, for practical advice:

1. Get your house in order internally. Data architecture, metadata tagging, content workflows — nail the fundamentals.

2. Audit your content’s footprint. Know exactly how, where, and by whom your work is being scraped. Tollbit was on the panel. ScalePost and Cloudflare also have service that allow for this.

3. Create true scarcity. If your journalism is everywhere, why should anyone pay for it? Carefully manage distribution to preserve value.

AI isn’t a distant horizon. It’s today’s frontier. The device landscape, consumer habits, platform relevance — even the open Web’s future — are all up in the air. By shoring up our foundations, we can move from reactive regret to proactive advantage. 

About this newsletter 

Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product and Tech Initiative. Jodie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global news media product.

This newsletter is a public face of the Product and Tech Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.

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