Week in focus: The Future of Publishing recap
Last week, The Media Leader took a deep dive into the state of the publishing industry.
Our coverage included insights from industry leaders about the threat of AI, the importance of becoming a regular destination, and balancing written and audio-visual content production to appeal to audiences of all sizes.
Here you can find a roundup of the full week’s coverage.
Build relationships, not just reach
The week kicked off with an op-ed by Professional Publishers Association (PPA) CEO Sajeeda Merali. Referencing a recent report by Enders Analysis, Merali declared it pertinent for publishers to move beyond trying to drive scale.
“As search, social and AI continue to reshape how audiences discovery content, scale alone is no longer enough,” she wrote. “The publishers best placed to succeed will be those who nurture these principles and are creating products people return to habitually, investing in the qualities that algorithms cannot replicate: expertise and editorial judgement.”
Refinery89 CEO Hugo Welkers agreed, noting the same “less-is-more” approach, “one that respects the user and prioritises a handful of high-impact, relevant placements over maximising scale,” also applies to publishers’ advertising models.
One publisher that is succeeding at both growing reach and becoming a regular destination for its readers, listeners and watchers is The New York Times. It has averaged more than 300,000 new subscribers for the past several quarters and posted double-digit revenue growth in Q1 2026.
Tom Armstrong, The New York Times‘s VP of global advertising joined The Media Leader Podcast to discuss how the news brand’s subscriber-first strategy is driving ad-supported growth as well. He also spoke about the title’s “solar system” of surrounding its reporting with verticals like cooking and games is driving habitual consumption.
So, what does a successful publisher look like in five years? Said Bountiful Cow CEO Adam Foley: “The publisher of the future becomes an IP company more than just a newspaper.”
Evolution of traditional brands meets professionalisation of creator economy
Moving beyond the written word has become a core aspect of modern publishing.
As Mail Metro Media’s chief revenue officer Dominic Williams told The Media Leader as part of a deep-dive into the company’s new-look commercial team, the Mail is no longer merely a tabloid, but a “modern broadcast publisher”.
Far be it for the Mail to be the only tabloid to embrace video, The Sun‘s commercial revenue director Owen Griffiths also joined The Media Leader Podcast to discuss how video has helped the News UK title secure new a host of new sponsors.
Yet for Time Out Media’s head of social and video, Chanté Piette-Valentine, publishers have historically viewed social video in the wrong way.
“For years, publishers have treated social as a marketing channel for journalism,” she wrote. “We took articles, cut trailers, resized images, added captions and hoped audiences would click through to our websites. It made sense when referral traffic was plentiful, and social was primarily a distribution engine. That era is over.
As publishers embrace video, Piette-Valentine argued, they must understand how to be relevant to audiences on third-party platforms, not merely reach them.
It comes as the creator economy has itself professionalised, with many former journalists increasingly forming their own independent publications on platforms like Substack, Beehiiv and Patreon and pushing their content out on social platforms and newsletters.
Beehiiv last week notably launched programmatic advertising and a host of new features for its writers, including a new Community function.
Ian Tournes, the former head of publishing at Publicis Group and a former Time Inc and Time Out commercial lead, is bullish on the commercial opportunity for newsletters: “I believe they’re one of the most underutilised advertising channels available today,” he wrote.
Fighting and adapting amid the road to Google Zero
The need innovate is being driven in part by severe financial headwinds caused by the development of AI search leading to more zero-click search results.
Some publishers have recently seen referral traffic from Google drop over 60%, contributing to wider overall drops in traffic of up to 90%. According to benchmarking data from Ozone, this has led to ad supply falling 40% year-on-year in Q2 across the digital publishing ecosystem.
According to Movement for an Open Web’s (MOW) co-founder Tim Cowen, regulation from the Competition Markets Authority (CMA) hasn’t moved fast enough. “In a year the majority of independent publishers could be gone,” he warned.
In response, publishers are taking a wide variety of actions to both challenge AI companies’ alleged theft of their copyright for use in AI training and adapt to falling referral traffic.
As The Media Leader summarised last week, this includes the creation of the SPUR Coalition to develop shared AI licensing rights; suing AI companies for alleged copyright theft; the development of MOW’s Search Only Contract for publishers to assert their content ownership rights and compel debt collection from AI companies; Cloudflare’s effort to block multi-purpose crawlers, potentially opting publishers out of appearing in Google Search altogether; and moving to embrace direct commercial relationships rather than open-market programmatic.
Importance of trust and quality
Ultimately, the publishing industry’s unique selling proposition remains news and magazine brands’s ability to foster trust by providing premium, quality information, and offering that halo effect to advertising parnters.
That is driving streaming giants like Netflix to embrace publishers’ premium video content, and growth in magazine publishers’s new unified programmatic marketplace, Atria.
As World Media Group CEO Jamie Credland wrote, Cannes Lions this year pointed to a renewed commercial desire for trust in an era dominated by AI slop and social media influencers.
So what is the future of publishing? For Credland, it involves “trusted partners, measurable outcomes with named suppliers, content that is so powerful the LLMs cannot help but prioritise it, and journalists as individual creators, with a recognisable presence, but within an established media organisation’s editorial and legal framework.”
Further reading
GenAI is disrupting publishing. Advertisers need programmatic AI to help repair it
Publishers need to stop selling audiences and start creating experiences