Two weeks ago in this space, scarcity shifted from argument to measurement. This week, the INMA conversation moved to the other side of the ledger: not what the industry is losing but what it actually owns.

From the INMA festival stage in Delhi to a virtual INMA Africa summit that drew 229 registrants from 27 countries, from newsletter benchmarks to AI rulebooks landing in newsrooms on four continents, the through-line this week was unmistakable — trust, habits, and direct relationships are the assets left standing, and the smartest publishers are learning to price them.

Delhi put a price on trust 

Our in-depth coverage from last week’s INMA South Asia News Media Festival in New Delhi produced the richest vein from the past few days. Five threads stood out:

• Print is funding what comes next: South Asia’s media leaders are asking print to fund the transition. HT Media CEO Sameer Singh named the three pressures — aging newspaper consumers, diluted digital traffic, rising commodity costs — while The Hindu Group’s LV Navaneeth described a “core and moat” strategy in which events, education, and books offset print’s decline. Vikatan Group has taken print from 80% to 50% of total revenue in seven years.
• Trust is already being monetised — in forms nobody counts: In the dispatch on how trust was being priced in Delhi, Amar Ujala turned down paid editorial coverage and sold the client a poetry gathering instead, and HT’s content-to-commerce operation has driven ₹1,500 crore in loan disbursements on the strength of trusted journalism.
• The revenue hasn’t caught up: Of India’s ₹1,11,000 crore advertising market, roughly ₹70,000 crore (63%) flows to Google and Meta. South Asia's publishers have the trust but not yet the revenue to match — as Prothom Alo Editor Matiur Rahman put it, “Audience trust is our only currency.”
• Habits beat breaking news: To build reader habits, Delhi’s newsrooms broke their own — Indian Express killed astrology and “acquisition content,” and JioStar’s Siddharth Sharma delivered the line of the festival: “Habit is the business. Live is just a spark.”
• Young readers won’t come to you: Publishers no longer expect young audiences to arrive on their own — Brut India has built an audience 89% under age 34, and Indian Express’ unbranded video play APT reached one million subscribers in a year. And with branded content up 19% globally and events-based branded content up 45% in India, publishers compared notes on which branded content work to refuse — a sign of a maturing discipline.

Africa is running the ownership playbook on hard mode

Yesterday, the INMA Africa Newsroom & Technology Summit drew 229 registrants from 27 countries for seven presentations and 2.5 scheduled hours that happily overran. What struck me was how precisely Africa’s leading newsrooms echoed the Delhi discipline — often under harder conditions:

• Do less, deliberately: Nation Media Group’s Harry Misiko, managing editor for content strategy in Kenya, described cutting daily story output from as many as 140-160 to roughly 70 across six Web sites — with traffic and conversions holding or growing, and a 2027 election plan built on candidate trackers and fact checks rather than rally-chasing. His line deserves a place on every newsroom wall: “Sometimes the most important editorial decision you can make as an editor is actually not to cover a story.”
• Mandate AI — but never let it write: Punch Editor Oyetunji Abioye in Lagos described the news industry’s most counter-intuitive governance stance. Journalists at Nigeria's most widely read newspaper are sanctioned for not running their copy through AI before filing — even as AI is barred from writing stories or touching news photography. “We never automate trust. Technology changes … credibility does not.”
• The affordability counterweight: Briefly News’ Rianette Cluley in South Africa offered the other side — enterprise AI fees priced in dollars are out of reach for most African newsrooms, a shared ChatGPT account nearly derailed their rollout, and “our readers still wanted human creative content. Believe you me, they can tell when it is AI created.”
• Independence as the product: BusinessDay Deputy Editor-in-Chief Innocent Unah’s Nigerian business-intelligence playbook rests on a firewall between revenue and newsroom: “Independence is not overhead; it is the product.”
• Platform risk is lived, not theorised: Vision Group’s Penlope Nankunda in Uganda described losing Facebook — their biggest social referrer — to a national ban from 2021 until early 2026, and 83% of SEO traffic to a botched site migration. The response: an in-house CMS (“built by us, for us”), WhatsApp communities, and a super app that grew from 2,000 users in 2020 to more than 10 million downloads by bundling news with bill payments, ticketing, and e-learning.
• Own the relationship, own the plumbing: Daily Maverick’s Julia Harris showed a membership programme — launched on a WordPress plugin in two days — now approaching half of revenue with no paywall: “A paywall can afford to be annoying, because it withholds something, but we don’t have that luxury.” The sobering flip side: At one point one in seven members had silently failed payments, roughly 14% of revenue.

The inbox is the most under-priced asset in news

Greg Piechota’s research this week made the sharpest data argument I’ve seen in a while for reallocating investment:

• The attention is already there: His case that the inbox deserves more investment in the AI era rests on a Northeastern University study of U.S. desktop behaviour: Americans spend 24.9% of their online time in e-mail — neck-and-neck with social media (25.3%) and nearly 10 times what they spend on news Web sites (2.5%). Gmail alone is the No. 1 destination on the Web at 16.4% of all browsing time.
• The leaders are already scaled: His companion piece pulls newsletter lessons from the top 50 news subscription brands, which together publish nearly 1,600 newsletters and alerts — a median of 25 per brand, from VG’s five to Le Figaro’s 104. Weeklies outnumber dailies three to one, and only 5% are subscriber-exclusive.
• The gap is measured in years: INMA Subscription Benchmarks show the median newsletter audience is about six times the digital subscription base, newsletter penetration correlates with subscription penetration — and a bottom-quartile publisher would need 14+ years at current growth rates to reach today’s median. If newsletters are one of the few scalable, direct relationships publishers truly own, investment levels and growth ambitions are badly misaligned.
• Prune, don’t hoard: Jodie Hopperton flagged that The Atlantic asks readers if they want to leave — e-mailing inactive newsletter subscribers to confirm they still want in, valuing an engaged relationship over a bigger database. The Hill runs the same depth-over-reach logic in reverse with its first paywall, aimed at helping “superfans” geek out with journalists through interactive video shows at US$5.99 a month.

AI rulebooks are being written by newsrooms

The rules of engagement for AI in journalism took clearer shape this week on at least four fronts:

• AP widened the lane: The Associated Press updated its newsroom AI standards, expanding permissible uses to research, headline suggestions, story summaries, and shotlists — with every output reviewed by AP journalists before publication and generative AI still barred from creating or altering news photography.
• Three newsrooms, three philosophies: Nieman Lab’s look at how three newsrooms are charting different paths for AI use shows the strategic split: Reuters optimising for speed (financial alerts in six to eight seconds), the BBC for oversight and labels, The Guardian for principles. The piece’s “verification tax” — the time spent correcting AI errors — is a phrase you’ll hear again, especially alongside the BBC/EBU finding that AI assistants misrepresented news content 45% of the time.
• Culture is the constraint: From INMA’s recent Latin American Conference came the reminder that publisher culture, not tech, is the real constraint on AI: Grupo Clarín's four-pillar governance framework, La Nación's model-agnostic backend, and Grupo RBS producing 13,000 short-form videos from a six-person team — 500+ million views at a 70% operating margin.
• The licensing wave rolls on: Meta signed an AI licensing agreement with Newsmax, extending a roster that already includes Fox News, News Corp, and USA Today Company. And in INMA’s own AI in the Newsroom Innovation Webinar series, Sonali Verma convened the Financial Times and the Toronto Star on building community with reader participation — the comments section, once shuttered as a troll pit, reemerging as a goldmine for engagement and reporting leads.

Doing less, owning more

Sonali’s Newsroom Innovation Initiative post on how Hearst and Les Echos squeeze more from less captures the operational side of the ownership theme.

Hearst UK reporters now justify every pitch by distribution channel. The result, per audience growth director Malcolm Coles, is this: “Just by doing less — but what we’re doing is more effective — means we've freed up time to do other important things.”

Les Echos curates nine to 15 articles daily from 120+ produced. NDTV’s Rohan Tyagi called it the end of “almost a decade of extensively writing for algorithms.”

Two distribution questions to sit with:

• Should you still build an app? Jodie asks exactly that: Global downloads fell 2.7% last year even as in-app spending hit a record US$155.8 billion. Her answer: An app should be the outcome of a product strategy, never the strategy itself.
• Is this Reddit’s moment? Northwestern’s Local News Initiative asks whether Reddit is local news’ next channel, with The Dallas Morning News and KQED finding loyalty there that algorithmic platforms no longer deliver.

Bottom line

Scarcity told us what’s shrinking. This week told us what to do about it: Price the trust, engineer the habits, invest in the inbox, own the plumbing, and stop chasing algorithms that stopped paying years ago.

What remains after the traffic recedes is what you own — and this week, from Delhi to Lagos to Kampala to Buenos Aires to the top 50 subscription brands, the news industry started managing those assets like the balance sheet they are.

What is new at INMA this week?

INMA x NotebookLM lab kicks off with training session. Since the session in June, participating media companies — Le Devoir, Mediacorp, Spiegel, Funke, The Republic, Mediahuis, Daily Maverick, Dnevnik and Nexstar — have been experimenting with NotebookLM to unlock their archives and create interactive, source-grounded journalism, ranging from election and civic-information guides to investigations, regional public-service tools and new ways of exploring historical, cultural and multimedia content.

The Jodie-led cohort has also taken part in office hours with the NotebookLM product manager to discuss feedback, challenges, learnings and product requests. Their final presentations to the NotebookLM team take place this week.

Audience-centric leadership at Melbourne Business School. INMA’s Greg Piechota led a case-based class for Australian editorial leaders as part of a development programme with Melbourne Business School. Participants tackled real dilemmas from Stuttgarter Zeitung, Amedia, and The Adelaide Advertiser, debating how newsrooms can reduce platform dependence, choose metrics that encourage the right behaviours, and organise journalism around audience needs.

Lauren Wetzel of WPP joins Media Advertising Conference lineup. The global president of data and technology for WPP, Lauren Wetzel, just signed on to December’s INMA Media Advertising Conference in New York. She will talk about what the buy-side actually wants now. Getting news on the plan, what unlocks the budget, and how publishers should adapt to an AI-shaped market is the focus of this panel — straight from the people deciding whether to buy.

INMA shines light on regional media innovation. We are 75% through INMA’s regional spotlighting of news media innovation. We have conducted two virtual regional summits for Africa (yesterday) and Latin America, with Asia/Pacific set for August. Last week’s South Asia News Media Festival, meanwhile, was an in-person conference and study tour whose coverage you have seen this week.

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