The Audiencers' team spent the first three days of June in Marseille for WAN-IFRA's 77th World News Media Congress (1–3 June 2026). Three days, one dominant question: what does AI mean for the value, and future of journalism? We sat through a dozen sessions to share a wrap-up of the event, and the conversations that mattered most.

• “Information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable”: AG Sulzberger, Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times, opened the Stewart Brand quote the industry has been misquoting for 20 years, and laid out an 8-point plan against AI’s “original sin”
• “ChatGPT converts 17x better than Facebook and 173x better than Google Discover”: Louis Dreyfus on the Le Monde & OpenAI deal, and why 25% of the revenue goes to the newsroom
• “Your next customer won’t be a human, it’ll be an agent”: the new three-layer infrastructure (Rights, Access, Payment) that lets publishers charge the machines
• “The metric I look at every morning is the share of our content that AI cannot copy”: VG’s Gard Steiro on speedboats, and hiring “the profiles we hired in the 90s”

The AI reckoning: rights, traffic, and the first real deals

AG Sulzberger (NYT): the “original sin,” and an 8-point plan

The congress opened on its hardest line. AG Sulzberger (Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times) argued that generative AI is built on an “original sin” (the unprecedented theft of publishers’ intellectual property) and that this theft is now re-enacted “countless times every single day.” His most effective passage broke an AI model into four inputs: talent, compute, energy and data. The first three are paid for, handsomely; the fourth, books, films, music, journalism, is taken without consent or compensation. No tech CEO would ask their engineers to work for free or steal chips from an Nvidia plant; on data, “we just take” has become the norm.

“Tech giants strip-mine news websites… that otherwise would go to the news organisations that created this work.”

AG Sulzberger, Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times

He was careful to add he is not anti-AI (the NYT uses these tools internally) and that his target is the companies’ choices, not the technology.

The scale he put on the table: the NYT publishes ~500,000 original works a year for over $2bn, and remains the single largest source of proprietary data in a major dataset used to train many different models. Meanwhile the Google click is 10x harder than a decade ago, rival AI models send 96% less referral traffic than a Google search, and the largest news sites tracked by comScore have lost 45%+ of traffic in four years. His action plan came in eight points — four to defend your rights (stand up for them, deal carefully, push legislators, join together) and four to strengthen your title (use AI the right way, be a destination first, focus on original reporting, explain why journalism matters). He closed by restoring the half of the Stewart Brand quote everyone forgets:

“Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life.”

Stewart Brand, quoted by AG Sulzberger

Le Monde × OpenAI vs the SPUR coalition: negotiate alone or organise together?

The panel, “Creating an AI content marketplace where publishers can win,” moderated by Madhav Chinnappa (Reuters Institute, ex-Google), with Niamh Burns (Enders Analysis) and David Buttle (DJB Strategies / SPUR coalition), put two strategies side by side. Burns framed it: news has real value in the AI era, but mostly for B2B and enterprise use; on the consumer side, AI products are embryonic and news sits at the margins. She cited the Disney / Sora deal, pulled abruptly after launch, as a warning — you can license what you want, you have no control over the product.

Louis Dreyfus (President & CEO, Groupe Le Monde) told how the OpenAI deal began: three years ago, a French publishers’ association lamented “we don’t even have OpenAI’s address.” Dreyfus used a public Q&A with Sam Altman — “you’re in France, the country of copyright… 83% of our revenue comes from our readers; how do you expect reliable information without that?” — got an “OK, I’m willing to discuss it,” and signed after a January-to-March negotiation. The numbers: ChatGPT converts 17x better than Facebook and 173x better than Google Discover, with no cannibalisation. (An INA study presented elsewhere at the congress confirmed the visibility upside: on French editorial queries, nearly a third of ChatGPT’s outbound traffic points to Le Monde — the publisher that signed.)

“We made a choice at Le Monde: to treat the revenue from these outputs as neighbouring rights. We share 25% of it with the newsroom — every single person in it. It helps the journalists, it helps journalism, not just the publisher’s business model.”

Louis Dreyfus, President & CEO, Groupe Le Monde

David Buttle, a founding member of the SPUR coalition, made the collective case: publishers arrived in disarray to search and social, and shouldn’t repeat it with AI. His warning on the deals themselves was the panel’s sharpest:

“Most of today’s AI deals are defensive agreements, not product partnerships. You sign, and you still get scraped. It’s rational to take the money on the table — but know that we have no control over what becomes of our content.”

David Buttle, DJB Strategies / SPUR coalition

On Mistral, Dreyfus was precise — a nuance worth keeping exactly as he framed it. His point was not that Mistral rejects copyright, but that it has signed with the press agency AFP and not yet engaged the wider French press: “it would be a good signal for a French company, backed by the French government, to abide by copyright AND engage with all the major French publishers,” noting NewsGuard ranks Mistral as the least reliable LLM on news.

Madhav Chinnappa closed with the framework that travelled around the room: “We now have three audiences to serve — agents, bots and consumers. ABC. Build products that the foundation models will, reluctantly, want to cite. Don’t wait for regulation. And do it collectively.”

Ezra Eeman (WAN-IFRA / NPO): from “AI in media” to “media inside AI”

Ezra Eeman’s State of AI plenary delivered the conceptual pivot of the congress. AI is now a mainstream habit (ChatGPT ~2.5bn queries/day; Google AI Overviews ~8bn AI answers/day; +250% AI use among UK over-55s in a year). But it’s barely used for news: only ~10% of prompts are about current events. People use AI to do things (write, learn, decide, act); classic journalism sits in the opposite quadrant, “generic, built for mass consumption.”

“The future value of journalism is no longer the article itself. What becomes valuable is everything around it: provenance, context, your editorial judgement, the updates, continuity over time. The question is how to turn all of that into machine-readable intelligence.”

Ezra Eeman, AI in Media Lead, WAN-IFRA / Strategy & Innovation Director, NPO

His WAN-IFRA “AI in Media” survey put hard figures on the shift: 58% of publishers report falling search traffic, 72% blame AI, and only 3.5% receive meaningful referral traffic from chatbots. His user-journey framework — Finding, Feeling, Flowing — describes a world where a personal agent surfaces the news before you ask, adapts it to your mood and context, and follows you across devices. The economic warning was concrete: a fixed-price subscription versus real marginal AI costs per query. “A large media group told me last week it had a monthly budget of ~€300,000 for coding tokens. They burned through it in 10 days.” His two parallel playbooks: go upstream (a trusted ingredient inside AI systems) and downstream (own the relationship, the community, the experience).

Florent Daudens & Christophe Israël: your next customer is an agent

The opening AI session (Florent Daudens, co-founder of Mizal AI, ex-Hugging Face; Christophe Israël, AI consultant founder of OK Lab) turned the theory into infrastructure. Daudens’ core message: the value chain is broken and must be rebuilt on three machine-readable layers where publishers can finally hold control:

1. Rights & Permissions (RSL, ODRL, CC Signals — robots.txt was a gentleman’s agreement, useless against agents)
2. Access & Enforcement (OAuth + MCP, Web Bot Auth)
3. Payment & Value Exchange (x402, AP2, AgentCore Payments). Micro-payments failed for humans (mental friction) but will work for agents (zero friction) — Sam Altman has floated “an agent paying 70 cents for a summary, $1 for the full article.”

“Your next customer won’t be a human, it’ll be an agent. Move from a supplier mindset to a builder mindset — you can design a conversion funnel on the agent side, just as you did for readers.”

Florent Daudens, co-founder, Mizal AI

Mizal has a “newsroom in a box” running daily in a large public broadcaster: five agent routines fire before the 8:30am editorial meeting (competitive briefing, fact-checking the prior day’s 20 articles — it already caught a real error past the desk — grammar/style, social trend monitoring, podcast monitoring).

Christophe Israël’s counterpoint: none of this holds without governance on four pillars (Policy, Roles, Risk, Monitoring), and Daudens’ refrain for anyone deploying agentic workflows — “evals, evals, evals.” The hard question is no longer technical but cultural: how do you equip teams to be good at working with AI agents?

The newsroom of tomorrow, in an AI world, is already being built

The Future Newsrooms Study 2026 (FT Strategies × WAN-IFRA): four gaps

Lisa MacLeod (Director, FT Strategies) launched the first edition of an annual global benchmark. Its thesis: we’ve entered the “community era.” When generic content is trivial to produce, the advantage shifts to what’s hard to replicate — original journalism, trusted relationships, loyal communities. For the first time, engagement is cited as the most frequent #1 priority for the year, ahead of reach. The study names four structural gaps:

• Strategy: 25% of newsrooms don’t translate strategy into daily editorial decisions; 62% involve only 1–2 roles in setting long-term strategy
• Trust: reporters still spend 38% of their time on production vs 33% pre-publication and just 11% post-publication — “a catastrophic waste,” given how good production automation already is
• Capability: only 14% of leaders are very/extremely confident their tech stack is fit for purpose; 42% still measure AI success by “time saved”
• Skills: confidence drops from 55% today to 39% at three years; 61% of newsrooms have no formal training programme

“Maybe the KPI isn’t ‘we saved seven hours,’ but ‘we made more original stories this week.’ The right question isn’t how much time you saved — it’s what can you do now that you couldn’t do before?”

Freja Sofia Kalderén, Development Editor, Bonnier — quoted in the study

The standout adoption case was Bonnier News (~2,000 journalists, 11 countries), which built three in-house AI platforms and, crucially, solved adoption through voluntary workshops (sceptics excluded by design, then opting in once ambassadors are trained): 2,000+ journalists trained, 7,800 prompts contributed in 10 months, weekly active users +45%. MacLeod’s own obsession: commissioning. “When commissioning is done right, aligned with the business, that’s where you unlock value, but today it stays destination-based, and 45% of newsrooms only use data after publishing, to validate, never upstream to steer.”

Gard Steiro (VG): speedboats, and the only metric he checks each morning

Gard Steiro, Editor-in-Chief of VG (Schibsted, Norway, with 2 million daily users, half the country), opened with a disclaimer: “if you’re expecting clear answers, you’ll be disappointed. Our job as newsrooms is to navigate uncertainty.” VG is a container ship, hard to turn, so it launches “speedboats”: small teams that run ahead, experiment, take sharp turns and come back with transferable learnings.

“They can move faster, they can be more agile, they can make sharp turns and experiment freely without risking the entire cargo, or audience trust in our journalism.”

“And one of these speedboats is called VGX,” a project for which company tasked a small team to “rethink everything” and “challenge the way we work across VG and Schibsted.”

VGX: engineers, business developers, designers and a single reporter, mandated to rethink everything from scratch.

One such project has meant abandoning some basic tenets of news publishing, including the traditional news article format.

Instead, the VGX app has no traditional front page, instead presenting users with a feed of content. And rather than being primarily text-based, video is a natural part of the app experience.

And of course, the metrics are following suite:

“I used to look at reach, now we’ve defined a new key metric: the share of our content that AI cannot copy. It’s at least as important as traffic, conversion and churn — because that’s our future.”

Gard Steiro, Editor-in-Chief, VG (Schibsted)

This is defined as “Super Content” – articles where journalists have been outside the office to report on the story, when they’re on location where the story is being written from, or when VG has received information that is not publicly available.

“This is a key step forward … because this content is our future.”

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A big thank you to the WAN-IFRA team for three days of frank, useful conversations in Marseille — and to the speakers who shared real numbers, not just slides. See you next year.

Methodology: this recap was written for Audiencers by Claude (Anthropic), based on Trint audio transcripts of the sessions and the speakers’ slides, translated and cleaned, and (for the Future Newsrooms Study) cross-checked against the official report. Quotations in quote marks are faithful reformulations, not exact verbatims; a few proper nouns transcribed from audio were verified before publication. Sessions covered at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, Marseille, 1–3 June 2026.

The post Inside WAN-IFRA Marseille 2026: the deals, the data, and the fight for what journalism is worth appeared first on Audiencers.

This article summarizes the session presented by Maxime Moné (CEO of Poool) and Virginie Clève (founder of Largow, a consulting agency) at the Audiencers Festival Paris on September 16, 2025. Together, they explored the question of “SEO & Paywalls: how can you combine audience and subscriptions in the age of AI?”

This presentation summarized in 5 points: 

- Choosing the paywall type (super hard/hard/soft) should be a strategic decision, not a technical one: each option has a different impact on visibility, content protection, and subscription conversion.

- Anticipate AI: allowing Google to read your content also means opening the door to ChatGPT or Perplexity; blocking Google risks a drop in SEO.

- Secure markup, and calibrate text before the paywall to prevent content leakage and find the balance between SEO (≥ 800 characters) and conversion.

- Adopt a hybrid blocking model: adjust the level of openness according to the value, lifespan, and type of content, rather than a single rule.

- Don't confuse protection with growth: blocking AI protects your content, but only a strong brand and a clear offering will create subscribers.

A lively presentation, Maxime and Virginie gave a candid overview of the current situation. SEO, paywalls, and now artificial intelligence are intertwined in a complex balancing act, where every decision influences visibility, conversion, and content protection.

1) Three types of paywalls… from an SEO perspective

Virginie pointed out that in SEO, paywalls fall into three main categories:

• Super hard: Google is treated as a non-subscriber, with no access to paid content. Examples: Les Échos, L’Équipe.
• Hard: Google is considered a subscriber, so it can crawl all content (e.g., Ouest-France and Le Canard Enchaîné).
• Soft: the majority of the market (~80% of sites)—paid content is visually hidden but remains present in the code, accessible to robots… and to any resourceful user.

Problem: in most newsrooms, this choice is not made by marketing management but by developers or SEO specialists, despite this being a highly strategic decision. “We can no longer treat the type of paywall as a technical parameter,” insists Virginie.

2) Why AI is changing everything

Before the advent of generative AI, a bypassable paywall was no big deal: crafty users were in the minority and subscriber growth continued. Today, it’s a different story. AI such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Meta AI can query Google via SERP API and reconstruct all or part of the paid content, without compensation for publishers.

The result: if you consider Google as a subscriber (hard or soft paywall), you are indirectly leaving your content open to AI. But if you close the door completely (super hard), you penalize your SEO. This is an unprecedented dilemma that requires careful consideration and discussion among teams.

Another new development: since August 28, 2025, Google has officially recommended that soft paywalls no longer be used. The search engine wants to avoid indexing paid content by mistake, particularly due to new AI features such as AI Overviews and Gemini. In short: a clear line must now be drawn between free and paid content.

3) Hidden SEO risks in your pages

Structured markup: in the NewsArticle or ArticleBody format, you should never insert the entire paid text in plain text. Otherwise, any AI tool or scraper can extract it and republish it elsewhere.

The same problem applies to machine translations: Google Translate can host media pages that are translated and laid out identically, but without tracking or advertising. This is simply a case of value capture.

The text before the paywall: Google considers that below 800 characters, a page is “thin content,” and below 1,200 characters, it is of average quality. On the other hand, the more you give, the less you convert. Each media outlet must therefore find its balance between SEO and conversion—ideally through A/B testing.

4) Hybridization, the future standard for paywalls

However, the solution is not to close everything off. Max and Virginie advocate a hybrid blocking strategy: adjusting the level of protection according to the value and lifespan of the content. For example, temporarily opening a news article, then closing it once its peak visibility has passed. Some publishers, such as Ouest-France, are already experimenting with engines capable of automatically arbitrating between free and paid content.

At the same time, other avenues are emerging: technical solutions such as Cloudflare or Akamai (access control, pay-per-crawl), or collective approaches (via GESTE, the Alliance, or joint legal action). But they all rely on one principle: this issue must be addressed across the board—product, SEO, subscriptions, and tech all around the same table.

5) Blocking is not enough to convert

Maxime Moné reminded us: “Users don’t subscribe just to access content. They subscribe for a brand, an experience, a promise.” Work on paywalls and AI is vital for the sovereignty and value of the media, but it will never replace editorial content, trust, and product quality.

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David Carzon (formerly of Arte, Télérama, Libération, and Binge Audio) is a journalist, consultant, and author. This article was originally published in his newsletter Hupster, and provides a follow up from Audiencers first article on Le Monde in English, published six months after its launch in 2022.

Increasingly more publishers are launching international editions, all looking to capitalize on the potential of AI translation, particularly into English. While these announcements sound promising, I have my doubts about their viability for private media outlets.

To see if there’s real opportunity here, I sat down with Arnaud Aubron, Director of Diversification at Le Monde. Having led Le Monde in English project for four years now, he shares why they launched, the target audience, the work required for this project, and how it’s on track to become profitable in 2026.

Does that make it a replicable blueprint? It’s not that simple. I’ll let him explain…

What needs did you identify that led to the launch of Le Monde in English?

The idea isn’t anything new. We actually found records of a print edition of Le Monde in English from the late ‘60s, though it didn’t last long. There’s always been this sense that a global heavyweight like Le Monde needs an English voice. To talk to the world, you speak English—and that’s truer now than ever.

The “why” was obvious, but the “how” was always too expensive. When we revisited the idea in 2021, two things changed the game: advances in AI (specifically DeepL) and the rise of digital subscriptions. Before, you’d need an army of translators, which was a non-starter. Furthermore, an ad-based model doesn’t work here because advertisers buy national, not global. Since the audience is naturally fragmented, we had to rely on a subscription-first model.

The post Profitable by 2026: the business logic behind Le Monde in English appeared first on Audiencers.

Morten Stald is a Senior Partner at Subscrybe, the leading Scandinavian consultancy specializing in subscription. In this article, Morten shares why he thinks you need to update your subs management system, what you should do before moving forward and what you need to consider when selecting the replacement solution.

We live in a digital age. Regardless of the type of subscription you offer, you likely have numerous digital interactions with your customers. This places high demands on the system infrastructure that supports your subscription business. At the heart of that infrastructure is a ‘subscription management system‘ which essentially handles the management of your subscribers, pricing, and subscription plans, ensuring that customers are charged the right amount – every time.

But, as a media professional, you already know that. However, do you know what is expected of your media business in the near future?

We keep a close eye on what subscribers like and don’t like. And we know for a fact that subscribers are harder to satisfy than transactional customers. After all, you need a good reason for charging them every month – and you need to deliver more and more value each month, in order for them to stay.

This is why we are currently helping Nordic media companies choose the best new subscription management system for their needs. And, if you didn’t already do it, we strongly encourage you to consider it as well. Because a new media reality is here. One, where your digital capabilities must be second-to-none, if you want to retain your readers over time. As print circulation slowly declines, media companies must prepare for delivering the most value in a new digital arena. And that is hard to do, without strategic IT investments.

The post Why it’s time to update your subscription management system to accommodate consumer trends appeared first on Audiencers.

Jason Langsner is Group Product Manager, Data + AI, at The Washington Post. In this article he shares how they built The Post's in-house generative AI chatbot tool that uses RAG to answer user questions.

The Washington Post may be best known for our world-class and award-winning reporting, but we also pride ourselves on being industry leaders in technology and innovation. In addition to producing journalism, we also develop products and solutions in house to improve our users’ experience, including through our expanding AI Pod Research & Development (R&D) lab and newly launched WP Incubator.

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This article summarizes the session given by Max Leroy, Audience & Product Strategist, formerly of The New York Times, CNN, and POLITICO, at The Audiencers’ Festival in Paris on September 16th, 2025.

This session in 5 bullet points:

• The real danger to the media? Not AI or Google, but our disconnect from readers’ needs.
• Plummeting trust, dwindling audiences, refusal to pay: in any other industry, we would be talking about the collapse of product-market fit.
• Urgent action is needed: we must stop pointless obsessions and return to users’ needs.
• This series of articles presents five toxic obsessions and offers five useful obsessions for the sustainability of the media: short circuits, communities, respect for audience needs, experimentation, and advertising/UX balance.
• This second chapter covers obsession number two: refusing to interact with audiences

What if the greatest threat to the media were neither AI, nor the “big bad wolf” Google, nor the decline in social traffic, not even the crisis in publishers’ business model? What if the real problem were us? Us and our persistent inability to take an interest in those we are supposed to serve: our readers.

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Ali Mahmood is a Digital News Strategist, helping publishers navigate the evolving digital landscape to build sustainable, audience-first revenue strategies—even in the most challenging environments.

This article was written off the back of a conversation from The Audiencers' Whatsapp group about how to prevent password sharing and account misuse within organisations. 

Many news and media publishers reach a point where subscription growth stalls even when all the basics seem right – a strong product, smooth onboarding, effective newsletters funneling readers in. Often an unseen culprit behind this plateau is revenue leakage: people accessing paid content without paying (or without paying correctly). This leakage tends to hide in the data – for example, odd spikes in “active users per account,” lots of free-trial users who never convert to paid, or unexplained churn. If left unaddressed, it quietly undermines growth, cutting into revenue and even skewing audience metrics. It can also create fairness issues that erode trust between your newsroom and paying subscribers.

Why revenue leakage happens (and why it hurts)

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Over the past few months, the team at Hearst Newspapers has been experimenting with AI tools to create “Connecticut Today”, CT Insider’s weekday audio news briefing. 

At first the team thought they could summarize a few stories, top with a quick introduction and finish with a closing sentence or two. Those initial scripts were fine but not really something you’d want to listen to daily to get caught up on the news. 

The post Launching a weekday audio news briefing with AI at CT Insider appeared first on Audiencers.

I'm Ali Mahmood, and I've spent 20 years watching the media industry make the same costly mistake: confusing technological activity with strategic impact. As someone who's led digital transformations at news organizations across four continents, I've seen too many smart people chase the latest platform update while their audiences quietly slip away. I'm here to help separate signal from noise!

Media has become a technology business. This isn’t rhetoric, it’s operational reality. Whether you’re running a century-old newspaper or a digital startup, your survival depends on how effectively you deploy technology to reach audiences and generate revenue. As newsrooms face mounting pressure from creator platforms and AI systems, the decision to build custom technology or buy existing solutions has moved from the margins to the center of strategic planning.

Understanding software development lifecycles and conducting rigorous cost analysis aren’t optional skills anymore. They’re survival tools. The industry is littered with expensive failures—custom CMS projects that consumed millions and delivered nothing, ad tech adventures that ended in obsolescence. But there are also remarkable successes where proprietary technology created lasting competitive advantages.

The essential frameworks

The Software Development Life Cycle( long read here) sounds abstract but it’s simply how software gets built in the real world. Understanding its phases helps you spot where projects typically fail and why timelines explode:

• Planning and Requirements: This is where you define what you’re actually building and why. In newsrooms, this phase often gets rushed because everyone thinks they already know what they need. They rarely do. Requirements shift, stakeholders multiply, and scope creeps before a single line of code is written.
• Design: Architecture decisions made here determine whether your system scales or collapses under load. User interface choices affect adoption rates. Database structures impact performance for years. These aren’t just technical decisions—they shape how journalism gets done.
• Development: Where code gets written. Usually the most visible phase and paradoxically the most predictable. Good developers can estimate coding time reasonably well. It’s everything around the coding that destroys schedules.
• Testing: Reveals the gap between intention and reality. Every newsroom that’s built custom tools has stories about features that worked perfectly in development but failed spectacularly when journalists actually used them. Proper testing doubles timelines but prevents disasters.
• Deployment: Moving from controlled environments to production systems where real journalism happens or where distribution happens surfaces integration issues, performance problems, and workflow conflicts that nobody anticipated.
• Maintenance: The phase that never ends. Software isn’t a product you finish it’s a service you provide. Bugs need fixing, features need updating, security patches need applying. The true cost of custom software lives here, accumulating month after month, year after year.

Total Cost of Ownership captures this full lifecycle burden. It’s not just what you pay to build—it’s what you pay to run, maintain, upgrade, and eventually replace. Operational expenses typically dwarf upfront investments. I’ve seen newsrooms spend five times their initial development budget just keeping custom systems running over three years.

The strategic trade-offs

Arguments for buying:

• Speed and predictability—vendors have already absorbed development costs and technical risk
• Your team focuses on journalism instead of debugging code
• Access to ongoing updates and support from specialists
• Proven systems that work from day one

But buying means accepting constraints:

• Limited customization options
• Your data lives in someone else’s system….This is what the first party data is discussion is partially about.
• Dependence on vendor roadmaps and pricing decisions.
• Generic workflows that might not match your newsroom’s needs

Arguments for building:

• Perfect alignment with your specific workflows
• Complete control over features and roadmap
• Ownership of code and data or open source. Open source means somebody did some serious work that you won’t need to pay for.
• Potential competitive advantage through unique capabilities

But building demands sustained commitment:

• Technical talent that understands both code and journalism. Bridge roles become important.
• Deep pockets for development and maintenance
• Tolerance for risk and potential failure
• Years-long commitment to ongoing development

The new complexity

AI adds urgency to these decisions. Should you develop proprietary AI tools or integrate existing services? The same calculus applies: What’s core to your value proposition? What resources can you commit? Where will proprietary capability create lasting advantage?

The creator economy raises the stakes. Individual creators now have access to sophisticated tools from major platforms. News organizations must match or exceed these capabilities while maintaining journalistic standards.

A strategic framework

The build versus buy decision isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum of options. As Aakash Gupta argues in his product leader’s guide, these decisions should align with your strategic priorities and organizational capabilities. The International News Media Association’s recent analysis similarly highlights this “gray area” between pure building and buying.

Build when:

• The technology is central to your unique value proposition
• You have resources to sustain development over years, not months
• Off-the-shelf solutions fundamentally don’t meet your needs
• The competitive advantage justifies the risk

Buy when:

• You need proven capability quickly
• The function, while necessary, isn’t your differentiator
• Your resources are better spent on content and audience development
• Vendor solutions meet 80% or more of your requirements

The hybrid path often makes most sense: buy core platforms but customize through APIs and open source integrations. This balances control with efficiency. Modern vendors increasingly offer this flexibility, understanding that no single solution fits every newsroom.

Without technical leadership at the strategic level, even established media organizations risk irrelevance. The future belongs to those who treat technology decisions as editorial decisions because in digital media, they’re the same thing.

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This article summarizes the session given by Max Leroy, Audience & Product Strategist, formerly of The New York Times, CNN, and POLITICO, at The Audiencers' Festival in Paris on September 16th, 2025.

This session in 5 bullet points:

• The real danger to the media? Not AI or Google, but our disconnect from readers’ needs.
• Plummeting trust, dwindling audiences, refusal to pay: in any other industry, we would be talking about the collapse of product-market fit.
• Urgent action is needed: we must stop pointless obsessions and return to users’ needs.
• This series of articles presents five toxic obsessions and offers five useful obsessions for the sustainability of the media: short circuits, communities, respect for audience needs, experimentation, and advertising/UX balance.
• This first chapter covers obsession number one: exhausting ourselves by criticizing platforms.

What if the greatest threat to the media were neither AI, nor the “big bad wolf” Google, nor the decline in social traffic, not even the crisis in publishers’ business model? What if the real problem were us? Us and our persistent inability to take an interest in those we are supposed to serve: our readers.

The symptoms of this disconnect are measured each year by the Digital News Report and the figures for France are damning:

• Trust in free fall: Only 29% of French people still trust the media, compared to 39% 10 years ago. This score places us among the lowest in Europe, just ahead of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary
• An audience that shuns the news: More than a third of the population (36%) actively avoids the news, exhausted by information overload and paralyzed by information anxiety
• A value that is no longer perceived: Barely 11% of readers are willing to pay for online news

In any other industry, such a verdict would be final: the loss of product-market fit. The absolute priority would then be to stop everything and go back to talking to our users, understanding their pain points and needs, and reinventing our value proposition.

How did we get to the point where our product no longer meets an essential need of its audience?

Yet where do our eyes and conversations among media professionals turn? To the evolution of algorithms and the experiences of Google, Meta, X, and OpenAI, which are drying up our traffic sources. Or to the adoption of ad blockers and the end of third-party cookies, which are jeopardizing our advertising revenue… We are obsessed with other people’s products, those that impact our distribution. Meanwhile, a new generation of content creators is exploding, forging direct and authentic bonds of trust with their audience, something we no longer know how to do with ours.

Of course, the risks posed by platforms are real, and the political, legal, and economic battle to defend our value is necessary. But it must not become an excuse to paralyze what is essential: the work of our editorial, product, and marketing teams to urgently regain that product-market fit. We must focus our efforts on what we can control and accept the rest. Fear does not prevent danger.

Let’s dare to use a metaphor that’s not so far from reality. Imagine for a moment that traditional media are like historic car manufacturers, spending their days complaining about gas prices, CO2 emissions regulations, low-emission zones, or the end of combustion engines in 2035. Meanwhile, in a decade, electric cars have become more accessible and cycling in cities has made a strong comeback. Users have moved on: you don’t fight product-market fit, you pursue it.

It’s time to radically shift our obsessions. We need to abandon toxic topics over which we have limited influence and refocus on our main lever for action: our relationship with our current and potential audiences. In this series for The Audiencers, I invite you to explore five of these toxic obsessions that paralyze our teams. The hope is to replace them with five obsessions centered on the needs of our audiences and thus find our way back to product-market fit.

Toxic obsession 1/5 : Criticizing platforms

Our first toxic obsession is to waste time and energy denouncing platforms. We criticize their products, algorithms, and decisions, but let’s be clear: these companies are empires that write their own laws and have the means to listen to (almost) no one except Donald Trump, who supports them. Some executives even display a visceral, personal contempt for the press. Why, then, would they negotiate sincerely with us, when our dependence gives them all the leverage?

The fight for neighboring rights or against uncontrolled crawling is legitimate. But to wage it from a position of quasi-absolute digital vassalage is to condemn oneself to reaping only crumbs. The real leverage for negotiation lies neither in Brussels nor in the forums we sign, but in our direct relationship with our audience. To start a serious conversation with Google, it would be wise not to depend on its services (Search, News, Discover). For many media outlets in France, Google accounts for more than 50% of traffic, and in some cases more than 85%.

Faced with changes to their products—AI Overviews in particular—our instinct is to want to slow things down and demand guarantees. This ignores the reality of their market. Google is not on a crusade against the press; Google is fighting for its own survival in the face of the massive adoption of LLM chatbots as response engines by users. Google’s goal is to stay in the game by responding to this new need. In this battle of titans, we are neither their ally nor their enemy; we are simply the battlefield.

To replace this trait: Grow our audiences through short supply chains

Our obsession with platforms keeps us in a reactive, sterile, and exhausting position. Since the balance of power is stacked against us on their turf, the only viable strategic response is to change the playing field.

Rather than fighting to optimize increasingly precarious traffic, we must devote our resources to building short circuits with our audiences. It’s up to us to transform volatile, algorithm-dependent readers into a loyal and engaged audience that we can activate ourselves. This approach makes our newsletters, apps, events, and communities the main tools of our resilience strategy to resume negotiations from a better position.

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