At the Audiencers’ Festival Montréal, Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth at The Guardian, broke down what actually motivates readers to give money to a publication with no paywall.

The starting point: ownership as the product

The Guardian was founded just over 200 years ago as The Manchester Guardian, a local UK paper. It’s now the fifth most visited news site in the world, pulling in roughly a billion page views a month. Its US team is small, about six people, working alongside a much larger marketing and reader revenue team of around 90 people at the London HQ.

The organization’s value proposition, as Harkin frames it, comes down to three words: global, independent, free. The independence part is structural, not just marketing language. The Guardian has no billionaire owner. It’s owned by the Scott Trust, established 90 years ago with a single purpose: ensure The Guardian can keep publishing in perpetuity. The Trust isn’t built to generate returns for shareholders. It exists to keep funding journalism.

That structure becomes the actual product sold to readers, not just backstory.

Ownership isn’t just a backstory

In the lead-up to the 2024 US election, both The Washington Post and the LA Times pulled their presidential endorsements, reportedly at the direction of their billionaire owners. Inside The Guardian, an editor suggested sending readers a simple message: we published our endorsement, and we always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to.

That email went out to The Guardian’s list. It generated two million dollars.

Harkin described it as one of those moments where you assume your analytics dashboard is broken, because the spike looks impossible for a normal day. What it confirmed for her team was that US readers are far more media-literate about ownership structures than publishers often give them credit for. People understood exactly what billionaire ownership can do to editorial decisions, because they’d just watched it happen at two major outlets, and they responded to a publication that structurally couldn’t be pressured the same way.

What people say when you ask them why they paid

The Guardian surveys readers immediately after they support the organization, while the motivation is still fresh. The consistent, top-ranked answers: protect the free press, protect editorial independence, protect the journalism itself. Further down the list, at roughly position six, is a motivation specific to The Guardian’s model: keeping the journalism free and open for everyone, not paywalled.

Further down still, in positions eleven through fourteen, is a newer and growing motivation: dissatisfaction with other media sources. Harkin ties this directly to visible cases of ownership interference, citing Jeff Bezos later restricting which topics The Washington Post’s opinion pages were authorized to cover. Readers notice, and it shows up in what they tell you when they give.

How this research becomes the actual email copy

The endorsement email wasn’t written as an abstract mission statement. It was built, deliberately, around the specific motivations the research had already surfaced, worded so it read as natural rather than like a fundraising checklist:

• Dissatisfied with other media: named exactly what The Washington Post and LA Times did, and what The Guardian did instead
• Wants editorial independence protected: explained the Scott Trust ownership model in plain terms
• Wants work that holds power to account: made clear that only the editor-in-chief, never a business owner, decides what gets published
• Wants to protect the free press: the direct ask

Harkin’s point in walking through this line by line: the research isn’t a slide you present once internally and then forget. It’s the literal structure of the copy you send.

The revenue mechanics underneath it

Readers who want to support The Guardian financially see three recurring options: a five-dollar monthly contribution, a fifteen-dollar tier called Supporter Plus that comes with added benefits, and a higher Digital Plus tier with more on top. There’s also a one-time support option and a recently launched student discount.

Alongside the main organization sits theguardian.org, a registered nonprofit. Harkin pointed to US philanthropic culture, Americans give roughly half a trillion dollars a year to causes, ranging from small one-off donations to major gifts, as a real reason this structure matters specifically in the US market, even though The Guardian itself isn’t a nonprofit. The motivations that drive nonprofit giving (mission alignment, wanting to sustain something you believe should exist) map closely onto why people choose to pay The Guardian.

The Guardian currently has 1.4 million digital subscribers. The UK has the largest paid supporter base, but North America, US and Canada combined, is the fastest-growing region, now at 14% of the base.

The takeaway

Her closing point applies well beyond publications without a paywall: figure out the full range of motivations and emotional connections your audience has with your organization, not just the functional value proposition of “you get access to the app.” Then keep telling that story, deliberately and repeatedly, across your marketing rather than assuming people already know it.

For The Guardian, that story is ownership. For another publication, it might be something else entirely, a specific beat, a founding mission, a community it serves. The method Harkin described, survey people right after they convert while the reason is still fresh, then build your actual marketing copy around what they tell you, works regardless of what that story turns out to be.

If you’re trying to scale a subscription or membership program, look at your current structure. Are you offering a clean, high-signal experience, or are you serving your readers "feature soup"?

At the Audiencers Festival in Montreal on June 25th, audience research leader Emily Goligoski and Rachel Mines, Director of Subscriptions at Skift, took the stage to break down a critical digital publishing dilemma: How do you package subscriptions to drive business growth without alienating the very audience that keeps you alive?

The exercise: fill in the blank

To find that sense of uniqueness, Goligoski runs newsroom leaders through simple prompts about their organizations:

• First in the subject, region, or world to ___
• Best compared to competitors in ___
• Only organization to ___

The exercise surfaces an origin story fast. But it’s only half the picture, and it’s the easy half — anyone can answer these questions for themselves around a conference table. The real value comes from asking the same questions of the people you’re trying to reach, who often can’t name your staff or your specific value prop but can place you loosely (“oh, that’s the one about the business of fashion”). The gap between the two answer sets is the actual work. It tells you what you think differentiates you and what has actually landed.

Her rule of thumb for this kind of testing: n+1 is better than n. At a minimum, show your prototype to one more person than has seen it already. You’ll walk away smarter from even one conversation, and Goligoski says fifteen years into doing this work, people still thank her for simply being asked for their perspectives.

But watch out for “feature soup.” When you start testing value props and benefits, it’s easy to try to cram everything onto one page or into one pitch. If a first-time visitor needs a magnifying glass to understand what they’re being offered, you’ve already lost the differentiation you were trying to build.

A few examples she pointed to of publishers getting specificity right:

• Caper, a New York food media outlet, prices its annual subscription against hyper-local reference points: “less than a burrata pizza slice at L’Industrie, a potato pancake at Veselka” instead of the generic “less than a cup of coffee a day.” It grounds the price and quietly reminds readers how many small recurring charges they’re already carrying.

• The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review have a once-a-year summer bundle offer for two publications with possible audience overlap and growth potential, a financially compelling deal rather than a permanent merge.
• Capital B, a Black-media outlet in the US, sent an anniversary email that included an actual screenshot of the text exchange between its two co-founders deciding to launch. It reads as human in a way most subscription marketing doesn’t.

Goligoski’s closing asks for anyone doing this work: 

• Limit friction wherever you find it
• Take a less-is-more approach to any data you collect (only ask what you’ll actually act on)
• Keep a running, visible wishlist of the features and coverage areas you hear people ask for. That list becomes a genuine insight bank over time.

The Skift case study: is your product an audience or a feature?

Mines joined Skift, a B2B travel media and events company, two years ago and inherited what she called “a family I didn’t plan for”: four separate subscription products, none designed to sit together.

• Skift Pro: always-on travel news, home-grown, positioned as “the Bloomberg of travel”
• Skift Research: long-form, data-driven reports, also home-grown, aimed at strategy and analytics buyers making a major decision rather than staying informed daily
• Airline Weekly: a roughly 20-year-old acquired product, once faxed, now a newsletter with its own site, read closely by aviation executives (Delta CEO Ed Bastian has called it “the only thing I read every week”)
• Daily Lodging Report: a similarly old acquisition, a daily digest for hospitality and real-estate operators

Three questions before you package anything

1. Identity: does combining these products strengthen each one’s core value, or dilute it?
2. Audience: are these audiences actually growing toward each other, or are they deliberately separate?
3. Operations: can your UX, billing, and support genuinely hold a bundle together, or will the seams show? Mines runs subscriptions with a five-person team, a small product team, and a small design team, capacity is a real constraint.

Applying these questions to the Skift context

Airline Weekly: bundled the content, not the experience. Skift already had aviation coverage in both Pro and Research, plus an aviation conference. The instinct was to fold Airline Weekly’s coverage into all of it. But the products stayed on separate platforms — readers had to hop between a newsletter, a website, and (for a much smaller group) a conference ticket. Layering content across products without integrating the actual user experience just produced a disjointed one. Nobody complained loudly about it; it showed up quietly instead, in renewal numbers drifting down. 

Mines’ takeaway: audit the identity of what you’re bundling before you bundle it. Packaging without UX clarity is just confusion with a price tag.

Daily Lodging Report: the right move was nothing. This subscriber base — Mines described them candidly as mostly finance and real-estate professionals — wanted exactly one thing: the digest, in their inbox, undisturbed. Skift gave the product a new site and new data tools anyway. The response was, in effect, I don’t care, just give me the newsletter. 

So, they left it alone, and it’s remained one of their steadiest, best-growing products. Leaving a product untouched is a strategic decision, not a lack of ambition. Some products’ value comes directly from their constraints.

Pro + Research: complementary, not interchangeable. These two live in the same sales conversation but serve different budgets and different personas — daily information versus decision-support research. Combining them into one package would have devalued Research and bloated Pro. Skift’s framing: they don’t need the same package, they need the same conversation.

Mines’ shorthand for thinking about all of this is a marriage metaphor: some products should merge households (full integration makes both better); some should keep separate addresses (related, committed, but each keeps its own front door); some need couples therapy first (real potential, but only after the UX and integration work happens); and some are simply happy as they are, and the kindest, smartest move is to leave them alone.

From the Q&A: a few things worth stealing

Don’t let a new feature justify a price increase — check whether anyone asked for it first. When Skift acquired the Women Leading Travel membership group, the team raised prices and then went looking for features to justify the increase — a research report, an add-on. Mines stopped that process to ask a more basic question: did any of these members actually want the research report? They hadn’t. What they wanted was networking and job connections, and that’s where Skift redirected. Goligoski added a comparable example: ProPublica offers a branded t-shirt only after someone donates, framed as a thank-you rather than a subscription perk — about 17% of donors take it, self-selecting into people who’ll actually wear it and become visible advocates, rather than shipping merchandise nobody asked for.

Test new features free before you charge for them. Goligoski’s suggestion for the free-versus-paid feature question: launch new features free first, watch uptake, get people to describe the value in their own words, and work out the rough edges before you decide whether it becomes a paid add-on or a built-in part of the product.

When you research your gap between positioning and perceived value, don’t blend your audiences. Talk to loyal long-term subscribers, low-frequency readers, and non-subscribers separately, and be explicit — internally — about exactly who any given finding came from. Self-reported research also goes stale fast, so treat it as something to refresh regularly rather than a one-time study you cite for years.

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The takeaway to carry into your next packaging conversation: don’t start with pricing, and don’t start with the bundle itself. Start with audience needs and wants, including the friction points people tell you about. The best package isn’t the one with the most crammed into it — it’s the one your subscriber would actually notice if it disappeared.

2. The tech triggers

Two key factors finally made the project feasible in 2022:

• Artificial Intelligence: AI finally matured enough to drastically lower the financial and temporal costs of translation.
• The digital subscription model: Unlike the 1970s print attempt, which incurred immense logistics costs to print and ship copies across the UK and US without any guarantee of sales, digital distribution completely eliminates the friction of international expansion.

Aubron contrasted this with The New York Times, which launched a Spanish edition in 2016 but shuttered it a few years later. The New York Times relied heavily on manual translation without AI and built a business model dependent on advertising rather than subscriptions, a strategy that ultimately proved unsustainable.

The launch and operational workflow

Following Aubron’s appointment in September 2021, the project launched in April 2022 to coincide with the French presidential elections.

At launch, the assumption was that AI could handle the heavy lifting, followed by a quick proofread. In reality, it required much more human intervention.

1. DeepL translation: The software was used to generate the initial baseline translation. While highly rated, the technology in 2022 still required heavy editing to meet Le Monde’s journalistic standards.
2. Professional freelance translators: To ensure maximum quality for a premium subscription product, two translator agencies were brought in to meticulously review and correct the AI-generated text.
3. In-house editorial team: A dedicated team of 8 journalists was embedded directly within the French newsroom. This physical proximity allowed them to collaborate, anticipate news, and edit translations seamlessly alongside the original authors.

Article selection: quality over quantity

Le Monde in English does not create original content; it exclusively translates a curated selection of the French edition.

• 30% of French articles translated: The team skips live coverage, podcasts, and strictly local French wire stories (e.g., specific domestic politics, local school or banking issues) that hold little relevance to an international audience.
• +10 daily dispatches: They supplement translated deep-dives with roughly ten English news dispatches per day to provide hot news.

Pricing: A “second read” strategy

Because an international reader is highly likely to already hold a primary subscription to a domestic title like The New York Times or The Guardian, Le Monde in English positions itself as a “second read.”

To account for this, the pricing structure had to be highly accessible:

• Introductory price: €2.50 per month for the first year.
• Standard price: Loops up to €10.00 per month progressively.
• Average price point: As of March 2026, the average revenue per user sits at €4.66.

Aubron noted that an attempt to raise prices in 2025 stalled subscriber growth because the price increase came at a time when audience acquisition hadn’t scaled sufficiently to absorb the change. Lesson learned: a secondary read strategy demands highly sensitive, highly competitive pricing.

Four years later: audience & subscription performance

The strategy has paid off, yielding steady traffic and subscription growth since the launch 4 years ago.

• Current Subscriber Base: Hovering near 16,000 active subscribers.
• The American engine: A staggering 50% of all subscribers come from the United States. Aubron attributed this to a stark cultural difference in the propensity to pay for news: while only roughly 10% of French consumers pay for digital news, closer to 20% of Americans do. The subscriber base consists heavily of students, retirees, and individuals with an existing personal, educational, or marital link to France.
• Global traffic footprint: The platform pulls in approximately 5 million monthly visits.
  • United States: 38.5%
  • United Kingdom: 12.2%
  • Canada: 9.5%
  • France: 7.3% (although access to the English edition from France is limited to subscribers on higher-tier plans)
  • India: the fastest-growing traffic segment
  • Germany: the first non-anglophone country.

What do they read?

True to Le Monde’s core strengths, the most read sections are international news, French politics, and economy. Surprisingly, culture and lifestyle pieces perform exceptionally well; articles about new Parisian restaurant openings or art exhibitions see massive engagement from readers living as far away as Texas and Florida.

Subscriber acquisition strategies

To recruit international subscribers, Le Monde deploys a three-pronged approach:

1. Leveraging LeMonde.fr’s SEO hierarchy: Internal debates weighed whether to launch on a standalone domain (LeMonde.com) or a subdirectory (LeMonde.fr/en). Choosing LeMonde.fr proved to be a major SEO blessing, allowing the English edition to instantly draft off the massive domain authority of the main French site.
2. Paid acquisition adjustments: Google advertising is a core driver. Aubron also highlighted a massive breakthrough in their Meta acquisition costs: after peaking at an expensive €86.90 cost-per-acquisition (CPA) in late 2025, optimization strategies successfully drove that CPA down to just €9.30 by March 2026.
3. Strategic publisher partnerships: By setting up reciprocal marketing exchanges with premium Anglo-Saxon publishers (The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic), Le Monde cross-promotes free trial offers directly to highly qualified audiences who are already accustomed to paying for premium journalism.

Achieving break-even

The most significant milestone of the session was the announcement that Le Monde in English has officially achieved financial break-even in 2026, a full year ahead of the initial business plan.

Revenue breakdown:

• Subscriptions: 66.2% (The core driver of the business).
• Licensing: 16.9%.
• B2B: 12.3%.
• Advertising: 4.6%.

Product evolutions: what’s new today?

Since its 2022 launch, the operational model has undergone substantial changes, heavily driven by advancements in generative AI:

AI-driven productivity gains

• The transition to ChatGPT: Le Monde migrated its primary translation workflow away from DeepL to customized ChatGPT protocols. This allowed the team to deeply bake Le Monde’s distinct editorial tone and style guides directly into the translation layer.
• Eliminating the translation layer: The quality of generative AI advancements and the know-how developed by the team of journalists completely eliminated the need for external freelance translators.
• Creating journalism jobs via AI: Instead of using tech to downsize, Le Monde redirected those cost savings into expanding its internal editorial team from 8 to 10 full-time in-house journalists. AI handles the mechanical translation, freeing human journalists to focus purely on editing, nuance, and curation.

Platform and multimedia expansion

• A bilingual app: They integrated a native toggle inside the core Le Monde app, allowing users to switch effortlessly between the French and English editions. While app users represent just 4% of total English traffic, they account for a massive 49% of all English subscribers.
• A dedicated YouTube channel: Rather than merging video content, they launched a standalone English YouTube channel. High-end video investigations have achieved breakout success: their video on Dubai money laundering garnered 760,000 views (vs. 1 million for the French original), and their documentary on the November 13 Paris attacks pulled in 2 million views (nearly matching the 2.2 million views of the French version).
• Apple News+ integration: Le Monde in English is now available directly within the Apple News+ ecosystem to capture a broader layer of casual readers.
• M International magazine: In March 2025, they went “back to paper” by launching a premium, biannual print magazine called M International (themed “The French Touch”). They distribute 25,000 copies across 350 elite newsstands in 20 countries and 37 global cities.

Key takeaways

Aubron concluded his presentation with three definitive lessons learned over the four-year journey:

• It’s not about translation: Translation is now a commoditized utility. Success comes down to content market fit, product distribution, and understanding the distinct profile of your international audience.
• Hard to imagine working in another language: Due to global curiosity around French art de vivre, culture, and global politics, in the US, the English edition works beautifully. However, Aubron noted he would not attempt to launch a Spanish or German edition of Le Monde yet, as those markets lack the critical size and same unique cross-border structural demand.
• AI can create jobs: The project stands as living proof that when publishers embrace automated productivity tools like generative AI, they can reinvest the dividends directly into hiring more human journalists to elevate the final product.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London 2026, Patrick Rademacher, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at Ringier Media Switzerland, shared how breaking down internal silos and calculating holistic Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is transforming their revenue model, and informing decision making across the entire organisation. 

For the first time, the publisher has the hard data to prove that investing heavily in deep, direct user relationships is entirely worth the effort.

To break this down:

• Reader Revenue CLV is calculated by multiplying the Average Revenue Per User by the subscription lifetime.
• Advertising CLV is calculated by multiplying the Average Revenue Per User by the readership lifetime.

Measuring users on two dimensions

Testing this new metric out, the team started with Ringier’s digital-only, German-speaking reach brand in Switzerland, Blick.ch.

While the project started as a complex manual spreadsheet exercise, the team is currently working on automating the process directly within their data lake. Patrick emphasized that these preliminary results are meant to show “t-shirt sizes” (relative proportions) rather than precise, absolute financial figures, the main goal being to prove that the ads vs subs conflict doesn’t exist.

The Blick user base was analysed across 2 distinct dimensions: funnel depth and loyalty.

Dimension 1: Funnel Depth

Dimension 2: Loyalty

What the data revealed

1. Funnel depth unlocks LTV

The data clearly proved that moving a user deeper into the funnel unlocks exponential lifetime value. Preliminary results suggest:

• Giving consent increases the value compared to “No Consent”.
• A logged-in user delivers a significantly higher CLV, well over 30 times that of a “Consent Only” user
• Moving from a login to a monthly subscription doubles the value, and a yearly subscription multiplies that even further

2. Subscribed users still drive ad value

The results exploded the myth of the ads vs subs conflict: subscribed users continue to generate strong advertising value. When looking at monthly and yearly subscribers, their advertising value remains high because they are highly engaged with the platform. 

This was also something shared by Bonnier Media at WAN-IFRA’s World Congress in Marseille: subscribers not only have a subscription ARPU of €300, but an advertising ARPU of €75.

3. The more loyal, the higher the LTV

When analysing the loyalty dimension, the lifetime value growth was even more staggering. A Brand Lover has a total CLV well over 50 times higher than that of a casual or one-time reader.

The final monetisation matrix

When combining these dimensions into a heat map, the value disparity becomes clear. In short, a high CLV directly correlates with high loyalty and a deep funnel stage.

While the high-value buckets are incredibly lucrative, the core issue for Blick.ch, and most reach publishers, is that the vast majority of the audience currently sits in the “Consent Only” bucket, which yields relatively low monetisation per user.

Speaking on a panel about registration as a solution to this challenge, Patrick highlighted how this data provides a clear financial incentive to log audiences, guiding users deeper into the funnel. 

However, Patrick clarified that registration isn’t a magic wand – the value does not come from the act of logging in itself. Rather, it comes from two secondary effects:

1. Engagement: Logged-in users consume more page views, creating more ad impressions and higher ad revenue.
2. Lifetime: Having a user’s email address establishes a direct relationship, reducing churn and making it far easier to eventually convert them into monthly or yearly subscribers.

Putting CLV into practice

To put these CLV insights into practice, Ringier Media Switzerland has shifted from just gating content to building features designed to deepen user relationships.

Because Blick.ch is well-known for its sports coverage, they launched a feature called “Follow My Team.” Sports fans can select and follow their favorite local clubs, national teams, or specific sports, creating a highly personalized feed and specialized team detail views. Of course though, if a user wants to save these preferences and access this tailored experience, they must register and log in.

By building a product that naturally incentivises identity over anonymity, they are successfully guiding casual users into the logged-in ecosystem.

Patrick highlights that understanding user value is becoming yet more critical with the rise of AI search and AI browsing modes. In an AI-driven ecosystem, publishers are most likely to lose the traffic of users with low loyalty who visit anonymously without a login or subscription. Building a walled garden of logged-in, loyal users is no longer just a revenue optimisation strategy, but a survival mechanism.

By aligning their teams and product strategy with a holistic Customer Lifetime Value, Ringier Media Switzerland doubled their number of daily logged-in users over the last year.

For the first time, the publisher has the hard data to prove that investing heavily in deep, direct user relationships is entirely worth the effort.

1. The strategy gap: moving engagement to the heart of the business

Newsrooms are recognizing that deep audience engagement is the primary lever to unlock long-term financial sustainability. In fact, audience engagement was the most frequently selected top-three goal for 2026.

However, a significant execution gap remains: 25% of newsrooms still make daily editorial decisions purely on instinct or reactivity, and 42% operate with only loose structural alignment.

Furthermore, the data proves that editorial growth stems directly from operational discipline. Newsrooms that systematically review and discontinue low-impact initiatives are nearly twice as likely to experience budget growth compared to those that manage portfolios on an ad hoc basis (50% vs. 28%).

What your team can do:

• Diversify the strategy table: Break down the church-and-state silos. Include audience engagement and platform leaders directly in your long-term strategy and investment conversations. Structurally aligned newsrooms over-index significantly on bringing these non-traditional roles to the table.
• Implement “portfolio discipline”: Set up a formal quarterly review to audit your newsletters, verticals, and content formats. Be ruthless about killing initiatives that fail to build a loyal public so you can redirect scarce editorial resources toward high-impact journalism.
• Shift from destination-first to audience-led commissioning: Currently, 64% of newsrooms still design stories for a single primary legacy channel (like print or a homepage template) and adapt them later. Instead, adopt commissioning frameworks—potentially assisted by internal AI tools—that force editors to identify a defined user need or specific audience group before a story is assigned.

2. The audience trust gap: rethinking participation and storytelling

Trust has evolved from rigid, institutional authority into relatable, relational signals. While newsroom leaders heavily prioritize audience relationship building, their workflows tell a different story: reporters spend a staggering 38% of their week on technical production drag, but a meager 11% on post-publication work like community building and responding to reader feedback.

When it comes to distinctiveness in an abundant content ecosystem, the ‘evergreen explainer’ of the past is being disrupted. Publishing teams are pivoting toward deep background reporting (+6pp in structurally aligned newsrooms) while actively steering away from low-margin daily breaking news (-10pp).

What your team can do:

• Bring community in-house: Stop relying on volatile, algorithmic social media comment sections to house your audience network. Take inspiration from pioneers like Newpress (building algorithm-free spaces for co-creation) or the Financial Times (leveraging interactive digital forums like “Ask an Expert”) to turn passive readers into highly engaged, recurring subscribers.

• Lean into service-oriented co-creation: Consider launching a reader-initiated reporting vertical. New Zealand’s Stuff Digital launched “Solving Stuff,” an interactive project prompting readers to submit local problems for journalists to actively investigate. This approach generated massive reader investment, with average time-on-page and completion rates soaring well above site averages.
• Be candid and transparent: Build ‘Behind the Story’ formats into your editorial mix to pull back the curtain on how your journalism is sourced and verified. Relational trust relies on showing your audience your journalistic motivations and methods.

3. The capability gap: shifting AI from efficiency to strategic maturity

Publishers are widely trapped in a Level 1 AI maturity mindset: 42% use time savings as their primary KPI for AI success, focusing strictly on automating existing administrative tasks like transcription or copyediting.

However, the biggest barriers holding back AI integration are people-based rather than technical, namely skills gaps (61%) and cultural skepticism (52%). Crucially, the study found that 57% of organizations do not have explicit AI representation in the newsroom, which directly correlates to the lowest literacy and adoption rates.

What your team can do:

• Embed AI roles directly in editorial: Do not leave technology procurement solely to isolated corporate IT or CTO functions. Move your tech budget closer to production by placing editor-coders, hybrid technologists, or dedicated newsroom engineers directly within your reporting desks. High AI usage and literacy jump dramatically (to 46%) when technical leads are embedded in the newsroom.
• Modernize backend metadata: Your AI tools are only as powerful as your archive. Publishing teams that systematically structure and tag their content assets with robust metadata report exponentially higher levels of successful AI integration and content retrievability.
• Reframe the AI conversation: Move beyond generic, mandatory tool-click training. Adopt a strategy like Bonnier News, which ran voluntary, playful workshops focusing on demystifying what AI fundamentally is and cannot do. This organically transforms open-minded early adopters into internal ambassadors who win over newsroom skeptics by proving how technology frees up capacity to do more investigative work.

4. The skills gap: transitioning from generalists to sharper specialists

Confidence in the future readiness of editorial talent drops sharply when media leaders look three years ahead. To thrive in a visually and technically demanding landscape, the industry is transitioning from broad generalism to a tightly bundled set of hybrid skills.

The primary skills priorities identified for future readiness include tech-enabled journalism (e.g., open-source intelligence, AI prompting), audience data fluency, and production expertise (short-form video editing, visual design). Yet, 61% of newsrooms still provide no formal training for these vital new competencies.

What your team can do:

• Formally define hybrid reporting profiles: Modern reporting roles require a multi-disciplinary approach. Audit your hiring pipeline to look for cross-functional profiles, such as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) reporters who combine coding with investigative craft, or “Podcast Correspondents” capable of owning a niche category across written text, audio recording, and visual presentation end-to-end.
• Invest heavily in creator-like on-camera training: 41% of newsrooms want to upskill existing staff into multi-platform visual creators, yet 68% of them offer no formal video or presentation coaching. If your strategy relies on launching visual content on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, you must systematically allocate budget to presentation, vocal coaching, and platform algorithm fluency.
• Evolve compensation models to retain niche talent: Because audience affinity is increasingly shifting from legacy institutional corporate brands to recognizable individual personalities, media companies must rethink retention. A dominant 78% of media executives agree that alternative payment structures, such as bespoke revenue shares, hybrid contracts, or performance-linked bonuses, are becoming essential to protect and incentivize your most prominent, community-driving journalists.

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Download the full Future Newsrooms Study 2026 report from FT Strategies here.

What’s working

A new “Join the Conversation” section of The New York Times was launched earlier in 2026, creating a discussion dedicated space for Times readers and reporters.

• On the article page, a featured comment modal directs readers toward the conversation window, which includes a refreshed layout and reader profile icons
• On some articles, Times reporters have shared thread-style breakdowns of their story and reporting process, adding context for readers who jump straight to the comments. These summaries, along with new inline headshots, build on the “enhanced bylines” introduced in 2023, which were aimed at highlighting journalists’ work

• Conversations are led by a direct question, followed by a comment from one of The Times’ journalists.

• The best contributions are highlighted and surfaced

This strategy helps conversations to feel valuable, and participation feels meaningful. Instead of noise, comments become an extension of the journalism.

What you should steal from The New York Times’ model

• Reframe comments as an editorial space, designed for quality over scale
• Lead the discussion with a direct question and a trusted voice
• Involve journalists directly in the conversations, ideally with a tag (think X’s blue tick), text or photo to highlight their position

Dive deeper into The New York Times’ model

• The New York Times is becoming subscription infrastructure for other publishers
• The New York Times dynamic paywall model, analyzed

2. Financial Times: loyalty isn’t built by speaking louder, it’s built by speaking with

Communities are built on trust, and for FT, this sits at the center of the brand. What’s more, it’s specifically recognized as a business driver. 58% of subscribers chose the FT specifically because they needed a reliable news source they could trust. To sustain it, they must strike a balance between trust in what they say, through quality and credibility of journalism, and trust in what they do, through the experience delivered at every touch point.

What’s working

Commenting has been a significant part of FT’s community-building efforts, especially as those who read the comments are 11x more engaged than those that don’t, and commenters themselves are 46x more engaged than those that don’t read or write comments.

• Community guidelines are easy to find and understand
• AI-powered moderation is being used to bring up the moderation baseline, re-trained off human comments, with humans still kept in the loop
• Editorially-reviewed AI-generated question encourage readers to join the conversation and be more thoughtful in their commenting

• A live Q&A feature, designed to encourage broader participation and lift conversation into the story

The team have also worked hard to cultivate “evangelical” communities, creating spaces for “authentic” and “nerdy” interactions that go beyond standard corporate communication.

The FT Alphaville section for instance has developed a core of evangelical fans by maintaining an authentic tone that appeals to readers on a personal level.

• It’s free to read
• Journalists engage directly with readers
• It doesn’t feel corporate or that the tone is being moderated
• You can meet the journalists in real life at small, unashamedly nerdy events!

These micro-communities focus on specific niches where belonging forms most naturally.

To deepen this advocacy, the FT also launched the Trusted Voices marketing pilot in 2025.

• Personal branding: By elevating individual writers and creating personal brands, the FT encourages readers to defend and promote specific journalists, which in turn reinforces their loyalty to the parent publication.
• Broadening inclusivity: Initiatives to make the FT feel less like a “gendered entity” (moving from 80% male in 2016 to 92% non-gendered perception in 2025) have been essential in making more people feel they belong, thus empowering a more diverse group of advocates.

What you should steal from FT’s model

• Move beyond engagement metrics towards trust, belonging and advocacy
• Use AI to reduce resources needed on moderation, but keep humans in the loop in the right places to build relationships with readers
• Consider building, or making use of existing, external, micro-communities that focus on specific niches – this is where belonging builds most naturally

Dive deeper into FT’s strategy

• Smarter discussions thanks to AI-generated talking points
• Building and serving communities with Ryan Y. Kellett, Financial Times and THECITY

3. Der Spiegel: from comments to conversations

The team at Der Spiegel found that whilst commenting was a huge part of their audience engagement strategy, conversations on a single topic were happening in multiple places across the site, diluting the potential value of this feature.

What’s working

The solution: a debating product inside of their website

• Qualitative research found that users associate trust and safety with these conversations when they happen under the DER SPIEGEL branding, so clear branding and a custom design ensures audiences feel confident that they’re in a safe space
• No possibility of “disliking” a comment, only liking

• They decided against real-name commenting after research that suggested users wouldn’t feel comfortable with this. They also have an account verification process, even for free members
• The feature is promoted in subscriber onboarding to increase regular usage amongst subscribers.
• And debates are integrated into editorial content and vice versa to encourage recirculation. Notice the high visibility of premium (S+) content here to promote the value of subscription.

Mexico’s Milenio has done something similar but with video content, fostering deep discussions on everyday life topics (Mexican lifestyle and social topics).

What you should steal from Der Spiegel’s model

• Test new, innovative formats to maximize the value of community engagement and encourage more guided interaction
• Integrate community features into the registration and subscription funnel
• Even if the community isn’t commenting at the end of articles, link community to content to encourage recirculation and continued engagement

Dive deeper into Der Spiegel’s strategy

• Going further with interactive engagement: introducing the debating feature
• Audience Research: identifying Key Engagement Drivers at DER SPIEGEL

4. The Times: reader-led journalism

The leading publishers have created an eco-system where readers fuel journalism that then fuels reader conversations, and so on. This is exactly what they’ve established at The Times & Sunday Times in the UK.

What’s working

After seeing conversations spark from a certain topic or article in the comments section, The Times’ Reader Comment Journalists reply directly to readers or set up interviews to dive deeper into the topic, with the goal of creating reader-led articles.

“Reader-led articles give a direct voice to our readers, but it also improves our journalism! The piece on the right below came from a call-out at the bottom of an article that got an amazing response from people telling us about how they beat their diagnoses. We ran it as a story and it really humanized the journalism. The other piece came from the simple idea of asking why people were running the London marathon. It pulled very touching stories together, and you could see in the comments section how positive the reaction was. These reader-led articles often bring yet more valued conversation within the community.” – Peter Jackson, Reader Comment Editor at The Times and Sunday Times

Live Q&As with journalists are another important engagement tool to directly connect The Time’s readers and writers.

The Times works with polls and embedded carousels to elevate comments, and they also feature reader contributions in their journalism, such as “Reader’s recipe”. This has a positive impact on the brand, and highlights how The Times’ values its readers.

What you should steal from The Times’ model

• Make use of reader comments to fuel journalism
• Consider strategies that help readers feel part of your brand and connected to journalists
• Use polls, quiz’s and Q&As to establish 2-way interaction

Dive deeper into The Times’ strategy

• Developing community beyond commenting, with The Telegraph and The Times

5. Other publisher relationship-building strategies of note

• The Globe & Mail’s live Q&As with journalists, call-outs and reader-led content
• The Economist’s Substack experiment: “Off the charts” is a newsletter on Substack, designed to engage new audiences who are already on this platform
• Digital Spy’s forums

• WIRED’s subscription re-launch, which now focuses heavily on community-building, in particular with their exclusive, subscriber-only newsletters, each with a writer at the forefront

• Handelsblatt Circles: lessons on community from Chief Growth Officer Jan Kleibrink
• Village Media have launched “Spaces” their own chatting platform, for users to connect with others based on topics of interest or joining in on conversations

> Daily Maverick built a database of contactable readers and their expertise

> The Guardian US meets underrepresented communities where they are

And the article you HAVE to read if you’re moving towards community-building: Why the most valuable newsroom KPI is no longer reach but belonging