Two days before our recent agentic AI master class, I saw this on Instagram from a friend:

She doesn’t find news products fit her needs so she has built her own agent using Claude Code to build a product, using her news subscription, that does.   

I immediately sent it to colleagues at the FT and thought about how we should incorporate this into the master class. To be clear, this isn’t about the FT. It’s about the news media industry as a whole. And it’s urgent. 

I didn’t tell her we were going to use them. We anonymized them, but I sent her a photo of the zoom call with one on screen, explaining that I was live hosting a master class for news media on this very subject. 

This was her response:

Interestingly they do have a layer where she can define her interests, as do most news organisations, because on the whole we encourage active personalisation. But clearly she hadn’t found it. 

So what led her to the place where she created her own news product? I called to find out. 

Some of the below is paraphrased to give a clearer picture of what’s happening and why. For background: This is a highly trusted friend who is intelligent. She is not unique in this situation. I use this as an example to demonstrate our product market fit issue in the agentic world we are moving into.

“I have never paid for news before but platforms are decaying and I need real news.” 

My read: Trust in platforms is eroding. She turned to a brand she believes in.

“I get to a Web site and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to find what I need because I don’t have the habit of browsing to find what’s relevant to me.”

My read: We have a generation — maybe two or even three — that doesn’t navigate news the way we expect. And now we have the technology to personalise. So why aren’t we? She forced it to work for her. How many others won’t go to that effort?

“It’s so easy, why don’t they do it?”

My read: It is genuinely baffling to her that she wants to give money to get a reliable, personalised news product, which took her only 30 minutes to build, yet news organisations aren’t providing this.

How easy was it? I asked her. She told me she went back and forth 15 or so times to get exactly what she wanted. “Could my mom do it? No, not at the moment. But in a few years she could.”

I followed up asking: What should we do?

“News orgs should get together and let me pick and choose what I want, make all this content available through one feed.”  This is a whole new challenge, but one agentic AI may solve — with or without our collective permission. 

My friend is not alone in this thinking. The market is small but it is there and likely to grow. What we don’t have is product-market fit. Not yet.

The question is: How fast can we build it?

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Banner photo: Adobe Stock By ipopba.

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