As traditional revenue streams collapse and AI-driven platforms siphon traffic, news publishers face an existential threat — and it’s no longer enough to simply ride the waves. Survival now hinges on making the right strategic decisions, rebooting journalism, and finding new business models.
For a long time I thought it was the most cynical thing I had heard in my working life.
“There are no prizes for being right, Alan,” said the senior executive during a conversation about whether we should sign up to a shiny new initiative that was being dangled in front of news publishers by a tech giant.
It was something that senior people at the company wanted to do and his implication was that though it was self-evidently – to us at least – the wrong thing to do, we should just shut up and do it. Even if it would waste us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds. And distract teams from our core business.
This went against everything I wanted to believe. Surely, the world rewards good ideas and ultimately they succeed over bad ideas?
But he was – ironically – correct: generally in corporate life there are no prizes for being right.
As you swim in the corporate ocean, there are a lot of waves that pass under you as they head towards shore, whether they are ideas or innovations or whatnot. You don’t really know if they will turn into ones that are good for surfing; it’s often luck that determines whether you catch the right one or not. It’s usually best just to rise up with each wave, hope you get lucky and certainly not try to swim against them.
Until now.
I’d say that, given the size and scale of waves that are facing the news industry, there is very definitely a prize for being right – and that’s survival.
Perhaps I should put it another way: the penalty for being wrong is now very harsh indeed. It feels clear that the news economy is being hit by multiple factors that in combination add up to an existential challenge.
In many markets, print circulation and advertising are finally taking that dive off the cliff we always knew was coming; web traffic has been sucked dry by algorithm changes; and, as if that weren’t bad enough, AI-powered answer engines are threatening to reduce referrals to publisher sites to a trickle. To extend my earlier metaphor, these are incredibly strong rip currents that threaten to drag us all out to sea.
I think everyone still agrees that society needs journalism to help it function properly. But it is becoming ever clearer that we cannot assume that in the future it will necessarily get it from legacy news organisations. We may end up reflecting that there’s a reason the word “legacy” is used.
If you think I’m being overblown, just look at these headlines from the past few weeks.
“The messy end of the pageview economy” – The Rebooting, June 5
“News sites are getting crushed by Google’s new AI tools” – The Wall Street Journal, June 10
“The end of publishing as we know it” – The Atlantic, June 25
If there are no prizes for being right, there are even fewer for spreading bad news. So let’s be positive: what can we do about it?
Here are my five starters for debate:
1 Reboot your journalism
I say reboot because I think some of the essence of journalism has been lost in the high-traffic era. Even high-falutin titles have become obsessed to some degree by chasing clicks and serving the algorithm first and their readers second. No wonder so many people in surveys say they are turning off the news. Many publishers have been writing it for Google and not for them. We need to get back to serving our audiences with stories that matter to them, that tell them something new has happened and what it means for them, to truly hold power to account, not act as advocates for one side or another. Of course many publications do this, but not enough of them and not consistently. Our digital products also need to take a decisive step away from the age of being, at their heart, replicas of newspapers – that model is broken, they must be made more responsive to user needs.
2 Stop blaming everyone else
Do you imagine that the horse dealers and trainers, blacksmiths and farriers, carriage makers and Hansom cab drivers sat around complaining about cars in the early years of the 20th century? Of course they did. Did it do them any good? Of course it didn’t. A disruption is by its nature painful for the disrupted, but we can’t just blame those we deem responsible and expect things to change. Sure, there is a case for publishers to be paid by AI companies for their copyrighted material, but don’t rely on it. We have to take ownership of our future and part of that involves adopting a positive mindset. That won’t take root unless we accept that there are indeed new (actually, quite old now) competitors out there and that they may well have taken some of our business. It happens.
3 Don’t hang on to the past
I recall Reed Hastings, the founder and former CEO of Netflix, visiting us at The Times in the 2010s. One story he told us stuck with me. He said that at a certain point he needed to get the company to stop fussing over its DVD rental business and truly focus on streaming, which he knew to be its future. So what did he do? He told those in charge of the DVD business that they could no longer attend management meetings and had to have one of their own. Suffice to say, I think we all know this worked out for Netflix. We need to do the same in the news industry – and I’m not talking just about setting aside the print business, but “legacy digital” too.
4 Choose a lane
If you really have to get something right, I think you need to choose a lane and stick to it. Many publishers seem to have a strategy of “everything everywhere all at once”, often done in the name of experimentation. However, after 30-odd years of digital news most by now should have a pretty strong idea of what is their area of advantage, whether in terms of journalism or business model. I’d say now is the time to really focus on it and optimise the hell out of it. Don’t pretend you’re something you’re not or divert resources from your most profitable areas.
5 Find a life raft
… and one that’s not journalism. It feels that an increasing number of publishers are realising that in a fully digital world they will need something beyond journalism to pay for their newsroom and its output. The New York Times seemed to realise this years ago when it started its diversification strategy into Puzzles, Wirecutter et al. Dow Jones has a raft of specialist B2B businesses alongside the Wall Street Journal. Axel Springer practically put out an advert last month asking for high-margin businesses that it could add to its stable. We should not be ashamed by this – in print days, what was advertising if not an adjacent business that would pay for the journalism? The race is on to find those new businesses.
These may seem like dark days for our industry. But it’s times like these when you get true innovation. We can no longer pretend that the old models will sustain us, so we have to find new ones. If this doesn’t excite you, then you’re in the wrong game.
Alan Hunter is co-founder of HBM Advisory, which works with publishers to build a profitable future
