At a year-end Product & Tech Town Hall, hosted as part of INMA’s Product & Tech Initiative, media leaders from Condé Nast, Mediahuis Netherlands, The Hindu, USA Today Co., and the Financial Times discussed how they are optimising for core customers and shared insights into recent AI-powered product initiatives at their companies.

Ruthless optimisation for core customers

Condé Nast

The battle currently facing the news media industry is about getting closer to customers and providing them a better experience worthy of the brand, Katherine Bailey, global head of product and design at Condé Nast, said.

To address a “cluttered” user experience, the company launched a programme called Destination Quality. This programme focused on decluttering the experience while standardising key assets in a way that allowed brands to retain expression and personalities. This was underpinned by a focus on performance and governance.

“This was really about helping our users to focus on the reasons that they were coming to us in the very first place, which are our stories,” Nicola Ryan, vice president of product design, said.

Condé Nast brought paywalls in-page, redesigned newsletter sign-ups, and rationalised some of the most intrusive ad formats. Improving quality also meant improving performance. With a focus on core web vitals in the second half of this year, Condé Nast has seen the biggest gains in CLS, which is how visually stable the page is, and made strong progress this year on IMP, which is how quickly the page is responding to input.

“So our sites are a lot more stable and quicker than they were at the start of the year,” Ryan said.

There is a key balance to be found in standardising some aspects of the experience to create governance and predictability needed for advertising and other monetisation while still enabling brands to retain the freedom of expression necessary to grow and nourish its audience.

“Our brands are our differentiator, and our USP, and how we express their unique personalities is really what elevates the clean and functional product into something that's meaningful and memorable,” Ryan said.

Mediahuis Netherlands

Riske Betten, B2C and product director at Mediahuis Netherlands, shared a cartoon to illustrate how companies must look from the outside in to optimise for core customers and truly know what is on their minds. She said it also illustrated a theory called “jobs to be done.”

“I think most of you will know it,” Betten said. “It says that we, as product builders, in fact are solution builders. People do not want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole in the wall.”

Solution building comes down to two reasons, Betten said: Increasing journalistic impact and increasing ease of use.

In terms of ease of use, Mediahuis has implemented live sports results in widgets so Web site visitors can see results without having to enter an article. Text-to-speech has also been a major improvement, as one in 13 people in the Netherlands cannot read well.

“It’s extremely important to make your products accessible for a broader audience,” Betten said, encouraging others to research literacy rates in their regions.

When considering which use cases to present, Betten said the best examples of ruthless optimisation happened when product strengthens the goal of journalism: “I have to conclude that root optimisation actually only happens when you multiply signature journalism and customer experience.”

Betten shared three examples:

• Custom images have a positive effect on subscriber attention time and reflects the brand.
• Puzzles, when tied into editorial content, saw twice as many games played.
• Local video in vertical format was aimed to increase connection with younger audiences but has actually resonated with all audiences.

AI products in action

The Hindu

Pundi Sriram, chief product officer of The Hindu, and his team noticed a particular difference when subscribers engaged with premium articles, which typically takes more time and effort to produce.

“There has been quite a higher bounce rate, particularly with premium articles among subscribers,” he said. “So, subscribers are coming to these articles and they bounce. It’s much higher than the normal bounce rates that we see on the traffic on our site.”

Their approach to address this issue was to focus on adaptive or liquid content from the editorial teams and convert them into multiple formats.

• Article summary and explainer using Gemini: Along with the summarised version of the article, there are specific questions the article answers in conjunction. After implementing this feature, there was close to a 30% increase in premium article consumption, “which means users are reading the summary and they are reading some of these Q&As, and still going on to read the full article in depth,” Sriram said.
• The Hindu Editcast: AI-powered editorial podcasts: “What we’ve now started to do is to turn our editorials into small 10-minute audio podcasts or audio episodes,” Sriram said.
• AI-generated headlines summarised from articles within the app (versus an external source), which some users preferred more so than other formats: In the future, as AI becomes more reliable, AI-generated summaries will curate multiple articles from a given period of time, like a week or a month, rather than a single piece of content.

With a diligent, user-centric approach to GenAI, The Hindu Group was able to successfully and strategically address a problem for its app subscribers by repurposing its content in an efficient way. AI tools helped to transform their content into summarised bits, audio clips and more.

USA Today

As USA Today continues to utilise AI tools, it is able to see progress in its engagement and monetisation as well workflow efficiencies.

As a large media company that services hundreds of markets, rote tasks can benefit from the use of AI, allowing for human talent to be better used in and outside of the newsrooms.

This year, USA Today released a major beta project called Deeper Dive AI, which is an “ask engine” powered by AI that produces context-rich answers from within USA Today’s content.

“Search is giving you an answer,” Kara Chiles, senior vice president of product at USA Today Co., said. “Asking is creating the space to have a dialogue.”

Another new feature is Homepage for You, Chiles said: “Which is partly how we’re doing some passive personalisation around our experiences.”

Thanks to a more personalised user homepage, in lieu of top headlines, the media company has seen growth in its click-through rate.

Sophi is an AI-powered tool that provides dynamic paywalls for subscribers and non-subscribers. USA Today has seen growth in conversion rates, and lower cart abandonment rates with this tool as it provides more tailored offers consistent with a user’s journey.

In expanding the user experience through video content, Chiles looks to Opus Clip, an AI video repurposing tool that converts long-form videos into short-form formats. The automation of short-form video production saves time and increases output across their social media platforms.

The result of increased production and frequency was reaching a milestone of 100,000 video views across USA Today's social digital footprint.

Preparing for Search Zero

As search continues to weaken, the Financial Times is intentionally turning inward, toward the strengths that cannot be automated or scraped. “What we really have to do is to focus on what makes the FT hard to copy,” Lucy Alexander, director of insight & analytics, said.

That includes its premium editorial brand — deep reporting, high-bar writing, and intellectually demanding analysis — and the trust built through its journalists. These two pillars form the foundation of its strategy going forward.

Alexander highlighted how relationships — between readers, journalists, and the brand — have long been at the centre of the FT’s value. Recent research captured surprisingly emotional language from subscribers: people spoke of “connection” and feeling “special,” and one respondent detailed a decades-long journey with the FT that culminated in “lunch in Paris with one of our journalists,” a story Alexander said was her “single favorite quote I have ever seen.”

This level of affinity is rare in media, and increasingly precious in a world where algorithmic intermediaries weaken the bond between publishers and audiences.

Alexander emphasised that the FT’s strategy is not about trying to claw back what search once provided. It’s about building a model that is resilient, one grounded in deeper relationships, clearer values, and more intentional distribution.

The question, she said, is how to “deepen these relationships with our readers and our journalists,” how to “meet our new audiences where they are,” and how to “double down on the traffic that we are still getting… whilst also at the same time optimising for the future.”

Banner art: Adobe Stock HM.

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