Search referrals are wobbling, social and video platforms have overtaken news publishers’ own sites as the world’s most-used route to news, and AI is producing content at infinite scale. INMA Media Innovation Week, which starts today in Madrid, is five days of answers from people who have actually tried something.

Nearly every session is a specific, tested response to some version of that pressure, and the most common unit of time on the agenda is seven minutes — the length of a rapid-fire case study, a format the Madrid programme returns to more than 20 times.

Here is what 261 delegates from 27 countriew will walk into:

Monday and Tuesday: inside Spanish media

The study tour is not a newsroom sightseeing exercise. INMA has run this format from Oslo to Stockholm, Hamburg, Berlin, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Helsinki, and Dublin, taking more than 200 European media professionals to the front door of media innovation, and the craft shows in how the two days are built.

Three things distinguish it. 

• Access: Delegates meet the leaders who own the P&L and run audience, product, and editorial rather than spokespeople. 
• Chatham House rules: This is what makes candour about missteps and pivots possible. 
• Sequence: Each stop is a chapter in a storyline that runs from acquisition to habit, from product to data, and from advertising to new storytelling.

The hosts span the full range of the Spanish market: Prisa Media, home to El País, Cinco Días, and AS; Unidad Editorial, which has consolidated subscription, advertising, and product teams across El Mundo, Expansión, and Marca; Vocento, balancing the national ABC with 11 regional titles and the Colpisa news agency while aiming to double its subscriber base by 2029; elDiario.es, which funds half its operation through members rather than a paywall; Prisa Radio, whose Cadena SER, Los 40, and W Radio brands reach more than 26 million listeners; and La Voz de Galicia, which holds a 63% share in its home region.

The stated learning outcomes are unusually concrete: registration and first-party data strategies, dynamic paywalls and churn reduction, how product teams prioritise and collaborate with newsrooms, branded content studios and SME advertising solutions, and how Spanish publishers are re-skilling teams from print-first to digital-first to AI-aware.

Wednesday: what sets winning publishers apart

The conference opens after lunch, hosted across all three days by Alban Mazrekaj, head of content technology and format development at NZZ, and Amalie Nash, vice president/journalism at Knight Foundation. 

Earl Wilkinson, executive director and CEO of INMA, delivers the opening keynote on the principles that separate winners in 2026: clarity of mission, product consistency, editorial distinctiveness, emotional connection, community trust, and the courage to stand for something.

Two sessions then press on brand. Anders Braso, chief marketing officer of Monocle, explains how a clear editorial vision, a recognisable design language, and a relationship with readers that goes beyond the transactional have let the brand thrive by refusing to blend in. Freddie Martyn, vice president of marketing and brand at Politico Europe, takes up the harder version of the same problem: protecting credibility and distinctiveness when AI is producing content at infinite scale.

Four rapid-fire case studies on brand awareness follow, from Het Nieuwsblad, Aller Media Nordic, InnovateMedia at Nordwest-Medien, and Ringier, whose Maximilian Boerke explains how the Swiss tabloid Blick built trust through emotion.

Pilar Gil, CEO of Prisa Media, closes the afternoon’s keynote programming with the editorial vision and cross-border strategy carrying Prisa from Madrid across the Americas. INMA’s European Board then takes 20 minutes for a leadership pulse featuring Eimear Moran, COO of The Irish Times and outgoing president of the INMA Europe Division, and Lina Hedenström, CEO of NTM and incoming president.

Thursday: young audiences, AI, and formats that move

Thursday opens on the demographic every publisher in the room is worried about. Jonas Lips, online social media host at DPG Media, built HLN’s TikTok following into the hundreds of thousands and will lay out his blueprint for blending hard news with lighter material for young audiences.

Kerstin Hasse and Sonali Verma, initiative leads at INMA, follow with a session designed to convert anxiety into action, using short case studies across markets on reaching new audiences, building innovation culture, and treating AI as an enabler rather than a threat.

Four more case studies cover younger audiences, from eldiario.es, Funke Media’s future audiences lab, Beobachter’s social-first strategy, and NTM.

The AI block is grounded in local evidence. Clara Soteras, a media SEO and audience growth consultant, presents the first Spanish study on how AI Overviews have affected media traffic since their April 2025 rollout, including the differential effects on evergreen versus trending content.

Heidi Iivonen, development manager at Sanoma Media Finland, then explains how the company moved from top-down tool deployment to a bottom-up model across 650 journalists, treating AI adoption as a change-management problem rather than a technology one.

The afternoon turns candid with a panel on projects that failed, followed by Ioanna Georgia Eskiadi of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki on when immersive and XR storytelling is worth the investment and when it is not.

Video case studies come from Russmedia, Amedia, and VG. The day closes with Diario Vivo, Spain’s live journalism spectacle, whose co-directors François Musseau and Vanessa Rousselot will explain how unrecorded, one-night-only performances became a format.

Friday: advertising, engagement, and shipping things

The final morning is the commercial one. Gabriel Dorosz, INMA’s Advertising Initiative lead, returns to the super user concept introduced in Dublin, joined by Tom Armstrong, vice president of global advertising at The New York Times, to work through what it means for ad products, metrics, sales strategy, and organisational structure. Award-nominated advertising case studies follow from DPG Media, Ozone, and Mediahuis Ireland.

Two sessions then tackle owned audience directly. Marc Isler of Tamedia presents the engagement data behind the company’s push to reclaim Switzerland’s puzzle game audience in under six months. Olaf Seydel, head of engagement and growth at Die Zeit, offers three ways to grow direct sessions as Google zero reshapes referral traffic.

The week’s largest single block is seven seven-minute case studies on engagement and reader revenue, spanning Politiken, Hegnar Media, El País, the Kyiv Independent, Information.dk, Seznam.cz, and De Telegraaf.

It ends, deliberately, on execution. Hanne Louise Åkernes of Bergens Tidende explains how to launch projects in weeks rather than months using in-house talent. Johanna Strandholm, vice president of content business at Alma News Media, and Nando Malmelin, professor of practice at Aalto University School of Business, close with an intrapreneurship workbook built to turn three days of conference notes into initiatives that survive the trip home.

Banner image: Adobe stock image by Stockbym.

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