I’m just back from spending a week with 40 CEOs in Vail at INMA’s CEO Roundtable. We had some invigorating conversations and brisk debates over various topics. It was a closed-door session held under the Chatham House Rule to ensure people could be as candid as possible. 

What do CEOs value in the news business — and what is considered dispensable now? We asked them.

Almost all said they want to automate breaking news and commodity news and their archives. Instead, they want to invest more in investigative units, star bylines and columnists, and especially creator journalists. 

What do CEOs consider the scarcest asset? Human relationships. In fact, they consider these scarcer than trust or judgment. So, expect a lot of efforts on community building and live events featuring journalists, which almost everyone said they want to ⁠invest more in. 

What else do they want to automate? Many said print operations, although there was also a fair amount of interest in killing print altogether. But, as one CEO said, “Print still makes money, man.” 

Many said they want to invest more in newsletters — or automate them. 

How much do they expect Google search referrals to drop? The vast majority of the room said that in 2028, they expect to have only 25% to 50% of their search traffic from 2019. 

Which assumptions are being retired?

• The idea that social media drives traffic.

• That evergreen content is always useful. As one CEO pointed out, it is useless to the news organisation and a mere commodity without brand packaging in an AI-driven information ecosystem.

• That audiences will continue to come to the site. Even loyal audiences now go to AI first for answers.

• That we can fix the Google Zero problem somehow “by just tweaking and reshaping it here or there. We have let go of that idea.”

• That the bulk of the work that newsrooms do is valuable. “News tastes like chicken — it’s the same everywhere,” as one CEO said. Newsrooms have now started understanding what that means. Expect a sharper focus on differentiated content.

• That digital traffic, measured by hits or pageviews, is valuable. That is no longer considered a metric to examine — other indicators that gauge engagement and loyalty are more important. 

• That we no longer have the size or sophistication to adopt AI in ways that benefit the entire company. We now realise it is a technology that is available to every news organisation, regardless of scale or maturity.

• That our relationship with subscribers is exclusive. “Even when we think we have a very loyal subscriber, they will go to AI. They pay a lot of money every month for our subscription — and they still cheat,” as one CEO said.

Even more interesting was their view on what the next assumption to be retired will be: That newsrooms will resist adoption of AI into news-gathering processes. 

Another assumption they expect to be retired soon: that news Web sites will remain relevant. Indeed, they are now becoming a legacy product. As one CEO said: “The experience of digitalising a newspaper is not the best experience. We are building for something that will be obsolete, but we have to.”

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Banner photo: Adobe stock image by InfiniteFlow.

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