Three days of closed-door meetings with technology companies and executives in San Francisco and Silicon Valley for our study tour were hugely insightful. They also left me with more questions than answers.

That became the starting point for our two-day conference: five questions about where news goes next. We tried to answer them on stage, then returned to them in The Debrief podcast.

Here’s where we landed.

1. Who will own the next interface to news?

We don’t know yet. Nor is it clear whether we’ll use one interface or several.

But we heard a clear challenge from Julie Young, a paying news consumer frustrated by how journalism is packaged. She wants the information, values it enough to pay, and uses AI to make it work for her.

That should make us think. A subscription doesn’t necessarily mean someone wants our Web site or app to be their destination. Their agent could become the interface. The question is how our journalism — and our relationship with that reader — travels with it.

Whoever earns enough trust for people to share their personal context will have a significant advantage.

2. When intelligence is abundant, where does value move?

Towards original reporting, expertise, relationships, and knowledge others cannot easily reproduce.

Local journalism is a good example. Understanding a community, knowing whom to call ,and being trusted enough to get an answer are valuable assets. So is being the journalist someone actively chooses to hear from.

Our event wrap-up podcast discussion kept returning to those human voices. Creator journalists can build direct relationships, and established news organisations can help their own journalists do the same. TikTok and Substack also reinforced how networks and adjacent interests help people discover something worth returning to.

3. What does news become when it knows your context?

Potentially, much more useful.

What do I already understand? What happened since I last checked? Why does this matter to my work, my family, or my community? What are my friends reading?

The same reporting could become a quick audio briefing, a deeper explanation, or a conversation. We saw how much easier adapting formats is becoming.

But personalisation needs editorial judgment, too. Helping me discover what I should know matters alongside answering what I already know to ask. That is an opportunity for journalism.

4. Who gets access and on whose terms?

The context of the request matters.

An agent helping a subscriber use journalism they’ve paid for is making a different request from a crawler collecting material for training. We need to understand who is asking, whom they represent, and what they intend to do.

The direction became clearer: control access, authenticate legitimate requests, and develop common standards. Add friction where it protects value; remove it where it frustrates paying readers.

Who sets the price remains unresolved. Production cost came up as a starting point. But cost alone cannot tell us what journalism is worth to someone using it.

5. How do we reorganise for an AI world?

Start by connecting our data so agents can understand the business.

One practical takeaway from the study tour: Everything doesn’t have to live in one system. It does need to be connected, with shared definitions that make it understandable.

Then comes the organisational work. Clear instructions, responsibilities, and management matter for agents, just as they do for people. Adding tools is only part of the job. We need to rethink teams, roles, and processes around what becomes possible.

I left optimistic about journalism’s value, with a much longer list of things to work through. More on those as the dust settles.

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