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News in the Digital Age showed a generational shift in user behaviour that makes the status quo unsustainable for publishers.

AI is being used to protect journalists’ time, double down on distinctive reporting and rebuild direct relationships through apps, registration and new formats.

18th February 2026

Ana Jakimovska, Head of AI Strategy at Mediahuis, highlighted that AI is speeding a split between breaking news and distinctive signature journalism.

The third edition of News in the Digital Age in London, hosted by FT Strategies and the Google News Initiative, unsurprisingly centred on AI. Across panels featuring editors, product leaders, creators and vendors, a clear story emerged that AI is reshaping not just newsroom tools, but distribution, discovery and business models. For publishers who already feel the impact of crumbling platform traffic and a renewed focus on owned channels and apps, the themes from the day were highly recognisable.

In today’s Pugpig Media Bulletin, we distil the key ideas from the event and discuss how they connect to the shift we’re seeing publishers make towards owned relationships and first-party strategies.

AI and the new front door to news

The opening session of the day from Ana Jakimovska, Head of AI Strategy at Mediahuis, made it clear that AI is already reshaping distribution economics. Google’s AI Overviews are early examples of a wider shift towards zero‑click environments, where compressed AI‑generated responses sit between users and publishers’ properties. As Ana put it, declining search referrals and the rise of these interfaces have knock‑on effects across company strategy, product design and business models.

SEO will matter less over time, replaced by whether a publisher’s journalism is consistently cited in AI-generated summaries. As user behaviour shifts, it’s going to become unsustainable for publishers to cling to the status quo. Acquiring new audiences will get progressively harder, so keeping people engaged once they arrive will be vital. For Ana, that means publishers need to evolve their owned product experiences to build deeper, direct relationships with readers. In practice, this involves integrating highly relevant, personalised content across the app and website.

Two paths to resilience, and what they mean for products

High‑volume news can increasingly be supported (and in some cases automated) by AI agents working across large databases of sources. In contrast, highly distinctive “signature” journalism, investigations, deep analysis and explanatory reporting, is much harder to commoditise and remains central to brand differentiation.

AI is accelerating the split between these two types of news. For product and app teams, this has direct consequences. News apps designed purely as thin wrappers for undifferentiated commodity updates will struggle to justify their place on a user’s home screen. Apps that showcase distinctive coverage, pull together live and in‑depth treatments of a story and build habit through well‑designed editions and notifications will be better placed to thrive.

To navigate this, Mediahuis has set out a four-pillar AI framework: build strong foundations (literacy, governance, technical capability), transform the company (operating model and culture) and transform product and business to ensure AI delivers user value and revenue, not just internal efficiency. Ana also emphasised protecting publisher value and working collectively with platforms to secure a fair value exchange, rather than negotiating alone.

State of the industry: Convenience, creators and the role of trust

The state‑of‑the‑industry discussions underlined what many data and audience teams are already seeing. Social media is now the primary way many users discover news, especially younger audiences who are more likely to encounter journalism as a clip from a creator or a post in a feed than they are to open a homepage. There was a growing expectation at the event that news will need to meet people where they are, in convenient formats and flows.

When asked how publishers can develop a differentiated value proposition for news, panelists Rozina Breen (Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting), Danuta Breguła (Ringier Axel Springer Polska) and Mitali Mukherjee (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism) converged on similar themes. These included holding power to account through investigative work, providing original reporting rather than commoditised updates and building genuine community around coverage – all seen as solutions that AI cannot easily replicate.

One way to support this is for brands to develop news creators in-house or partner with them, but that brings a fresh challenge. While creators can be powerful drivers of reach and authenticity, they also test how far editorial standards and brand safeguards can stretch when audiences connect more with individuals than institutions.

From an app perspective, this reinforces a pattern we have discussed with several Pugpig customers. Successful apps lean into depth, habit and relationship‑building, rather than trying to recreate an infinite feed of interchangeable articles. Apps excel when they provide a sense of membership and continuity that is hard to achieve in a purely platform‑native presence.

Rethinking workflows: Al Jazeera, The National and NetInfo

Several of the later panels zoomed in on concrete examples of AI‑enabled workflow change. Al Jazeera described how their newsroom architecture was, until recently, still organised around linear delivery, with a focus on fixed bulletins at the top of the hour. Meanwhile, audiences were increasingly consuming news in a fragmented, “flow‑live” way across channels. Mohamed Moawad, Al Jazeera’s Editor-at-Large, described their response as a focus on livestreams – getting breaking news to screen immediately and shifting the central question from “is it ready to publish?” to “how does this moment travel?”. AI’s role here was not to replace reporters, but to protect their time by taking on tasks like cutting clips, generating captions and creating variants for different platforms.

The National in the UAE offered a complementary story. In a market where paywalls are rare, they have invested heavily in registration and now see registered users spending multiple times longer on site than anonymous visitors. Editorially, they are committed to publishing only human‑generated news, positioning that stance as a differentiator. Operationally, they use AI to improve the operating model, joining up touchpoints, supporting recommendations and saving time on rewrites and production tasks.

NetInfo’s “Scale without sacrifice” story had a similar arc. They built AI into their CMS to tackle real bottlenecks in day‑to‑day production, with an explicit target of reducing time spent on routine work. They are using automation to free up journalists to focus on in‑depth reporting and distinctive pieces.

Emerging voices and sustainable creator strategies

The second to last session of the day picked up a thread that ran through the whole event: the rise of creator‑led models. Brands like BellaNaija are dealing with audiences who consume a lot of content through AI surfaces and short‑form social video. This has led them to focus on Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), the practice of making sure their content is findable and properly represented inside AI‑generated answers.

Goalhanger, by contrast, has leaned into long‑form, starting with history podcasts in a relatively underserved space and building from there. Their co-founder, Jack Davenport, emphasised that their growth has come from a focus on strong presenter relationships and from long‑form content that can carry sustainable monetisation. Lauren Saks from Local News International, underlined that simply “bringing in new audiences” on new platforms is not enough. The key is building a sustainable offering and giving talent room to develop, supported by proper business development rather than just reach targets.

For news apps, this suggests a few clear roles. They can act as homes for long‑form and series‑based content, podcasts, narrative features and video explainers that deepen the relationship with audiences. They can also give talent and creators a stable, branded environment where their work is not at the mercy of platform algorithms alone.

Where this leaves news apps and owned products

Across all the panels, the theme that AI is a powerful accelerant, but it cannot fix weak products or undifferentiated journalism, kept resurfacing. Where it does have impact is in sharpening existing trends:

Publishers aren’t rushing to use AI to generate content – they’re using it to free journalists for higher-effort work. To counter AI and broader societal shifts in news consumption, they need to double down on harder-to-produce formats like long-form reporting, original investigations, and emerging formats such as video. This also makes the case for strong, app‑centred, first‑party strategies even clearer. Apps and owned channels are where you can reliably:

If you are grappling with how to bring these ideas into your own app roadmap, from AI‑enabled curation to registration journeys and high-engagement formats, the Pugpig team would love to continue the conversation. Get in touch at info@pugpig.com to book a chat, or if you’re an existing customer, speak to your Customer Success Manager.

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