In the immortal words of The Beatles, it’s been A Hard Day’s Night after attending both the Future of Media Technology conference and the Awards ceremony afterwards, where I presented the award for Best Use of AI, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Stepping onstage, I couldn’t help feeling, well, existentially challenged. After all, this is the week Anthropic announced there was a 10% chance of AI killing humanity within the decade. Was that a PR blunder or genius on their part? ’Twas a topic passionately discussed at the event over copious amounts of red wine.
Speaking of wine, the award for best soundbite has to go to George Monaghan from the New Statesman, who, describing the advantages of expertly targeted newsletters over randomly assorted homepages, said ‘A homepage is like a wine list without a sommelier.’
I get you George, I have the same problem every time I visit Wetherspoons.
Reflecting somewhat bleary-eyed this morning, I think you could say D2C was the main topic of the day. The panic over zero-click seems to have subsided, and news publishers are now firmly focused on engaging more directly with their audiences, whether by launching new studios to embrace (or perhaps challenge?) the creator economy, sending habit-forming newsletters, or using AI to free up journalists’ time so they can focus on original storytelling.
At least, that’s the goal
As usual, I’ll finish with my interesting picks of the day. Here goes:
Jon Slade, FT CEO since July 2025, talked about its journey from page views to fans, with Recency, Frequency and Volume all part of the mix, alongside Recognised Users. These are users who have given the FT their email address, opted into marketing, etc. In other words, they are sending potential loyalty signals.
They also look at ‘Quality Views’, i.e. how far down an article a reader travels and whether that results in a share or comment.
It was also interesting to note that the FT reaches the most under-35s in the UK, which surprised many in the room. Jon pointed to their ‘future audiences initiative’, which is already helping them towards their ultimate goal of achieving 850,000 recognised users under 35 by 2030.
He mentioned their ‘geeky finance’ Alphaville Substack as one of the ways they engage with younger audiences.
He also mentioned FT Edit, which was initially a standalone app until it was folded into their main app due to issues around discoverability. Interestingly, they promote FT Edit as a downgrade offering to users who are thinking of cancelling their subscription.
Elsewhere, we learned that 70% of The Times of London’s audience reads via its app. Its Golden Metric is ‘Daily Return Rate’, which Anna Sbuttoni has spoken of before. It is daily active users divided by monthly users, expressed as a percentage.
The Guardian is using AI to help with predictive models designed to keep its audience engaged. The Times of London is using AI to help with moderation in the form of OpenWeb.
To help signal WHY you should subscribe, The Guardian often leads its messaging with key investigations or campaigns it has recently run.
Press Gazette has launched a newsroom tool to stop AI fakes before publication
On an excellent panel on how newsrooms can engage with the creator economy, I thought Graham Page (dig the SEO LinkedIn URL) had an excellent point: if you’re trying something new, what are you going to do less of? Otherwise, you’re going to overwhelm a team. We don’t hear much about what publishers are stopping. I’d like to hear more of this.
Some of the video panellists were sceptical of Amol Rajan’s new venture. Can slow news really be delivered in two-to-three-minute videos? We shall see.
Andrew Palmer, The Economist, emphasised that trust and connection were key to news creator output. You can’t have one without the other.
Carly Steven said zero-click might be here, but the Daily Mail is perfectly positioned to support brands struggling to regain lost visibility.
Tom Jackson or ‘Tagging Tom’ as he’d been called when trying to introduce more metadata at News UK, emphasised that metadata was still as crucial as before in an age of AI. News UK is using Netacea to track AI bot behaviour across its platforms. They currently block 6% of traffic from bots.
Carly celebrated the new AI Overview control tool that is now available in Google Search Console, and hoped we would get more granular control soon. But she also emphasised that opting in or out of overviews was tricky when Google is constantly experimenting and occasionally adding Top Stories to AI Overview and AI Mode results. What’s it gonna be, Google?
Politico is currently looking at how it can bridge the gap between its large free subscription base and its paid products. As Katie Palisoul explained, part of the work is deciding which free registered users should be sent on that conversion journey.
Mads Holmen pointed out that everyone might be talking about AI-generated micropayments for publishers, but who is actually set up for this right now, or even investigating it as a possibility? Good point.
A good session with Reach’s David Higgerson, who put the case forward for free local news coverage. If 90% of people in the UK don’t currently pay for news, how can we realistically expect them to? Hence its advertising model, alongside a healthy subscription model with 65,000 paying subscribers.
He mentioned The Express was the first to go with its premium tier earlier this year, and more will follow. I think this is a really interesting space because, in order to be successful, newsrooms must clearly signal the difference between free and premium paid content. If it’s just news stories behind a paywall, I think users are reluctant to sign up. David also mentioned that they use the Synapse tool to help teams verify information.
Anna Jeys (Reach) said that she might look at newsletter metrics like CTR, open rates, conversions, frequency, etc., but ultimately her team is asking how their initiatives are creating habits in their audience.
The Logic’s David Skok said that although newsletters are a key focus, they should be part of a holistic content strategy that drives users across your portfolio. He also mentioned a common challenge for publishers: how long does it take for a free subscriber to become a paid subscriber? He said that, for The Logic, people either pay in the first 48 hours or it takes around seven months. So, again, do people understand your value proposition? In The Logic’s case, it’s ‘We are going to make you smarter in your life’, and ‘Why haven’t you signed up?’ rather than ‘Please sign up.’
Congrats to Dominic Ponsford and the team for putting together another great conference.