Editorial and content production now account for 32.5 percent of total expenditures across the global media industry, according to the WAN-IFRA World Press Trends Outlook 2025-2026.
The data highlights a structural imbalance in how news organizations allocate resources, suggesting that many companies are optimizing for production metrics that do not align with actual financial or strategic value. Ladina Heimgartner, President of WAN-IFRA and CEO of Ringier Media Switzerland, argues that the current industry approach to artificial intelligence is exacerbating this mismatch by focusing on cost reduction rather than the redesign of the underlying business model.
AI investment and maturity gaps
While 93 percent of publishers have identified AI and automation as their primary investment priority, a significant gap exists between capital expenditure and operational capability. Nearly half of the industry—46.2 percent—currently describes its AI maturity as “emergent.”
This disparity indicates that the primary constraint facing newsrooms is not the availability of technology, but the persistence of inefficient operating models. Automating existing workflows without first questioning the value of the output scales existing inefficiencies rather than creating new value. In an era where AI can generate an infinite volume of content, the proliferation of “easy-to-produce” material is diminishing the market value of generic reporting.
The transition from reach to relevance
A growing disconnect has emerged between measurable reach and user intent. Many news formats continue to generate high traffic volumes but fail to produce subscription conversions, transactions, or long-term brand loyalty. This “time waste economy” relies on anonymous traffic, a model that is increasingly fragile as content abundance renders simple reach insufficient for sustainability.
The industry is seeing a corresponding shift toward personality-driven journalism. As trust moves from institutional brands to individual voices, journalists with significant independent followings are increasingly utilizing platforms such as Substack, YouTube and various podcasting tools to manage their own distribution and monetization. This trend allows creators to bypass the overhead of traditional media institutions.
To counter this, media institutions must offer a value proposition that solo creators cannot replicate. This involves a dual-brand strategy: utilizing “reach brands” to create wide-scale awareness and “depth brands” to provide the specialized context necessary to convert that awareness into loyalty and financial transactions.
Revenue diversification and the subscription limit
The reliance on subscription models as a primary recovery strategy is reaching a structural ceiling. While subscriptions provided a necessary financial bridge, they have not fundamentally transformed the relationship between the publisher and the user.
Data shows a pivot toward more active forms of value capture. Revenue generated from events, specialized services, and strategic partnerships rose to 25.4 percent in 2025. This shift suggests that value is increasingly found where media brands can enable a user to take a concrete action—such as attending an event or solving a specific problem—rather than simply consuming information.
Protecting public interest journalism
The move toward transaction-based revenue requires a strict structural divide within the newsroom. Applying commercial optimization and “intent-to-action” logic to service-oriented content is viable, but applying the same logic to investigative reporting or political analysis risks undermining the trust essential to public interest journalism.
The sustainability of the civic mission depends on a transparent transfer of funds, where efficiency gains from commercial and service portfolios explicitly subsidize the journalism that cannot be monetized. Without this structural protection, public interest reporting remains dependent on goodwill, which is vulnerable during economic downturns.
The challenge for mid-sized organizations is particularly acute. Companies that are too large to pivot quickly but too small to withstand platform dependency face the highest risk of commoditization. The strategic objective is now to shift editorial capacity away from automatable tasks and toward high-differentiation work that secures user trust and institutional sovereignty.
These structural challenges and the redistribution of editorial resources will be central themes at the World News Media Congress in Marseille this June.
