Greg Piechota tracks the subscription offers of the 50 largest news brands for INMA. His March analysis found not one holdout. All of them now package something beyond plain text news.

The more interesting finding sits beneath that number: Product lines are reorganising away from content and toward segments.

Dow Jones runs several Wall Street Journal subscriptions where it once ran one, divided by how professionally the reader uses it. Le Monde has tested packages reaching outside journalism altogether, as far as Spotify and HBO.

That is the right direction. It is also a decision about the offer, and in most organisations I work with, it stops there. The portfolio changes. Underneath it, the business desk still reports to a managing editor and still competes with politics for the front, and nobody in the building can say what either one costs or earns.

Two news subscriptions leave my account each month, and they sit on opposite sides of a line. The New York Times owns everything about its arrangement with me. It sets the price, holds the renewal, sees what I open and ignore, and decides what goes into the package next.

When it discovers that a subscriber uses Cooking more than news, it can act on the finding: reprice, repackage, commission differently. That is what a bundle is worth to the company that owns it.

The Financial Times arrives as a benefit on a Revolut card, alongside ChatGPT, a meal-delivery service, and a VPN. It knows I registered and can see what I open. Whatever else it learns — what the card is for, where the attention it competes for goes, whether it is the reason the card gets used or one of the perks nobody opens — it learns because Revolut chooses to tell it. It does not set the price, hold the renewal, or own the decision to keep it there.

Revolut recently dropped Perplexity from the benefits list and replaced it with ChatGPT. No subscriber was consulted, and none needed to be. If a news brand goes the same way, it will not have lost an argument with its readers. It will have lost a negotiation it was never party to, and will then have to win them back in open competition with the whole package that used to sit inside.

One of those arrangements is a subscriber relationship. The other is rented space in someone else’s product.

Owning the relationship is where this starts, not finishes

The Times got there deliberately, over a decade, in part by paying several hundred million dollars for a sports title. That option is not on the table for a regional publisher. The question for everyone else is what segmentation looks like without buying inventory, and the answer is to build around a community the company already serves.

I call these content tribes, and a tribe is not a section. A section is defined by what the newsroom produces. A tribe is defined by who it serves and what that group needs from the company — journalism included, but not only journalism. The old package was a mixture of topics, organised by newsroom section. The new one is a mixture of content and services, organised around a single community.

Eleven years ago, I was writing about building verticals around the interests of parts of a publisher’s customer base, each carrying its own content, monetisation, and cost strategy. So, the basic idea is not new, and it does not need the scale of The New York Times to make it happen.

Ibbenbürener Volkszeitung, a German local newspaper with a print circulation of around 25,000, organised its newsroom around topic areas in the middle of the last decade. Readers paid per topic or a flat rate for the lot. It worked, but it did not spread, because a topic package could then offer little more than a filtered stream of articles.

Today a topic package can be something else entirely

It is local reporting and investigation, and also a city guide, a business directory, council meeting alerts, neighbourhood events, and an AI assistant built on a decade of the newspaper’s own reporting. That assistant is the difference between a bundle of sections and a service, and it is available now to publishers who could not have built it three years ago.

It also arrives with obligations. A system answering readers in the newspaper’s name makes editorial claims on the newspaper’s behalf, and the governance for that has to be settled before launch. (What that governance involves, and where AI belongs in an editorial architecture, is the subject of my upcoming book, The Architecture of Journalism in the Age of AI and an ongoing series in my newsletter, The Field Note.)

A tribe has its own audience, its own price, and its own reason to exist. The brand becomes an umbrella. The company becomes a portfolio manager.

Bundling products is a pricing decision, and all 50 of the largest have now made it. Rebundling around audiences is an organisational one, and that decision is still sitting on the table. A tribe needs someone accountable for it, and a set of figures nobody in most companies has assembled. That is the harder half — something I’ll revisit in a future article.

Banner image: Adobe stock image by NK.

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