The newsrooms better positioned for this moment share a counterintuitive characteristic: they have diversified beyond content as their primary economic engine. Journalism is how they demonstrate value and build credibility. But they are not betting everything on it as a revenue source.
If your advertising revenue disappeared tomorrow, what would remain? The answer to that question is your actual business. Everything else is a subsidy from a platform that has already started withdrawing it.
The B2B and utility pivot
The Jersey Bee is building a B2B communications product alongside its civic journalism, a service for local organizations that need to reach specific community segments, built on the same infrastructure the newsroom uses for its own distribution. The journalism proves the infrastructure works. The service diversifies the revenue.
Contexte in France operates as a pure B2B business: subscriptions sold to lobbyists, government professionals and policy organizations who need fast, accurate policy intelligence. Their next phase is becoming a one-stop shop for doing the work. Revenue comes from professional utility, not general readership.
The content portfolio is expanding
The default assumption is that journalism is the product. What the research suggests is that journalism may be better understood as proof of concept: evidence that you know your audience well enough to make something else they’ll pay for.
Nicholas Quah, a critic at New York Magazine and Vulture, puts the logic bluntly: “The New York Times is a games company.” His point is that the Times built a reason to stay subscribed on days when the news doesn’t justify the cost. Puzzles, cooking and games. The journalism acquires the subscriber; everything else keeps them there.
The same logic is playing out in video. At Malaysiakini, Head of Operations Seen Hau Tham found that moving from institutional news clips to reporter-led long-form YouTube built a new offering: IP that could be taken directly to advertisers.
Marie-Claire Fennessy, Live Editor and London Newsroom Manager at Reuters, has watched slow live video – nature cameras, wildlife streams, Albuquerque’s hot air balloon festival – slow content that asks nothing of the viewer, is quietly growing an audience that news fatigue may have driven away. What those viewers are seeking isn’t information. It’s a reason to stay.
Direct revenue: what’s working
For newsrooms not positioned for B2B, the research points consistently toward direct revenue: member-supported, subscription-based or event-driven models built on real audience relationships.
MPR’s morning newsletter illustrates the mechanism: a daily prompt that turns a daily touchpoint into a gathering. Subscribers who engage are more likely to convert to paying members than passive readers. The newsletter isn’t a content product. It’s a relationship product. The relationship is what generates revenue.
Kerri Hoffman, the CEO of PRX, identified a useful sequencing: video builds audience, it does not generate revenue as of yet. Audio and newsletters convert that audience into subscribers. “One strategy that we are employing is looking at creators that share our sense of purpose and then retrograding them into radio and podcasting,” she said. The creator brings the audience and the format generates the revenue. If 1,000 people give at $5 a month, you can begin to build the foundation of a sustainable business.
The cost of building custom community products has collapsed. What required hundreds of thousands of dollars three years ago, a subscription platform, a bespoke community tool, a members-only newsletter system, can now be built for a few hundred dollars a month with AI-assisted development. A platform built specifically for a newsroom’s 500 most engaged members was economically impossible not long ago. It is not impossible today. The newsrooms that recognize this earliest will have options their peers, still chasing mass audiences they can no longer reach, do not.
The next tier: the agentic audience
The discoverability problem Seth Lind is solving in Module 4 has an economic dimension. What Lind is addressing at the distribution layer, getting AI systems to find and understand your content, is necessary but not sufficient. The next question is what happens when they do.
David Clinch, co-founder of Media Growth Partners, tracks a new audience emerging alongside humans: AI systems acting on behalf of users, retrieving and consuming content without a human click. His argument is simple: “Will this find an audience” is no longer a marketing question. It’s an editorial one. He says it needs to shape what gets made, how it’s structured and how it’s priced, from the moment of conception. He goes further on what that actually looks like in practice: “I might suggest that there is a specific process that is emerging to manage the ‘onboarding’ and ‘retention’ of authorized agents that are acting on behalf of individuals.” Publishers who have spent years optimizing for human reader loyalty are about to need a parallel practice for a different kind of audience entirely.
The newsrooms that build for this audience now will have options their peers do not. The ones that treat it as a future problem are making the same mistake they made with search.
Alongside civic journalism, building a B2B communications service for local organizations that need to reach specific community segments: hospitals, civic groups, local institutions. Built on the same distribution infrastructure used for news. The journalism proves the model works. The service pays for it.
Video builds audience and audio generates revenue. Find independent creators who share a sense of purpose and bring them toward audio. Direct support from even a small part of the audience can help build a sustainable business.
AI systems are already retrieving and consuming content on behalf of users, without a human click. Treating this agentic audience as a distinct tier, with its own access model and pricing, is a present consideration, not a future one.