Every news company I know is running two businesses this month, whether or not the organisation chart admits it.

The first is the business that pays: subscribers, super users, the readers whose names you have. The second is being built where the next audience already lives: creator feeds, vertical video, AI conversations. This week, the INMA conversation put numbers on both — and one sentence explained why you cannot choose.

It came from Siv Juvik Tveitnes, CEO of Schibsted and INMA’s new president, talking to Kerstin Hasse: “It is not that the younger audiences are leaving us. They never arrive.”

Four directions inside INMA, one storyline:

• INMA Young Audiences Summit: Three newsrooms, three ways to build creator journalism and today’s closing module on building the people.
• INMA Readers First Initiative: Greg Piechota’s Webinar on how Corriere della Sera reached 754,000 digital subscriptions without surrendering reach.
• INMA Product & Tech Initiative: Jodie Hopperton on super-user maths and on who gets paid in an intention economy.
• INMA Advertising Initiative: Gabe Dorosz’s ledger on ChatGPT ads and agentic trading.

The insight: The audience that funds you and the audience that will replace it are not the same people, and their habits are forming in different places. Corriere’s lesson is that you don’t have to choose. Corporate layoffs this week show what happens when you do.

The Summit: three ways to build it

The INMA Young Audiences Summit, curated by Kerstin and made possible by Knight Foundation, closed today after three modules that drew more than 380 participants from 185 companies in 44 countries. Tuesday’s module showed one problem solved three ways.

Birgit Coenen of SPILNEWS described how Mediahuis — whose oldest title dates to 1656 — launched a Gen Z news brand that reports to the board and sits outside every existing newsroom. Thirteen months on, 16 people produce 60 assets a week. Because 71% of Dutch youth won’t pay for news but 90% of SPILNEWS followers accept transparent branded content, partnerships run €20,000 to €50,000 a campaign — and journalists never front them. “How we make decisions every three weeks is maybe a year for a legacy title.”

Rebecca Hutson of The News Movement called the 200-year-old newsroom architecture “increasingly unworkable”: “We stopped showing them the receipts.” Ellie Beetham of dmg media showed the legacy version at scale: a year-old social venture now 100-strong, with 150 million followers.

The insight: Mediahuis built the second business outside the first and gave it the board’s ear — as Schibsted did with its digital units 25 years ago, when, Siv recalls, “very few people actually believed in it.” The pattern is a unit that can decide in three weeks, not a social desk inside the newsroom.

The Summit: how to build the people

Thursday’s closing module of the Young Audiences Summit turned to talent. Johanna Rüdiger of Deutsche Welle, who started her own TikTok in 2020 and now sees creator formats across 100-plus DW channels, trains traditional journalists into creators in a day: pitch, script under a minute, film. Her warning was that creator work is not journalism dumbed down but journalism made harder — deeper research, one relevant angle, a FaceTime-with-a-friend tone, a niche held relentlessly. Don’t hire “young TikTokers” by default; experienced reporters’ research craft is the asset.

Sara Goo, president of The Washington Post’s Creator Network, runs the network outside news and opinion so it can move fast. Sponsored Featured Voices series pair vetted knowledge creators with Post editing, fact-checking, and legal review; creators keep the IP, the Post co-publishes. Six months in, sponsor demand has beaten expectations, six new shows are planned by year-end, and the goal of an audience at least half under 45 has been passed. Her metric shift: stop judging social video by subscriptions; measure engagement, retention, community, and sponsor revenue. Her frame for the week: habitats, not funnels.

From the Axel Springer Academy, Vinzenz Mayer and Lisa Reck reported from the youngest desks: Bild, once absent from TikTok, launches there within weeks and runs a 30-creator Creators Club on its homepage. What young journalists need is time, not tech: one to two protected hours a day, a phone and €10 headphones, 60-second explainers.

The insight: The creator you cannot hire is usually the reporter you already employ, one training day and two protected hours away. And the Post’s rule is the one to copy: Build in the audience’s habitat, and stop measuring it with the first business’s funnel.

The business that pays

Greg’s Readers First Webinar with Fabio Napoli, digital business director of RCS MediaGroup, was the week’s clearest account of how the first business gets built. Corriere della Sera went from 135,000 digital subscriptions in 2018 to 754,000 in 2025 by refusing the either/or: “Subscription was not sustainable without reach, and also without advertising.” Entry offers of €5 a month or €6 for the first year are “not the price of journalism” but “the price of removing the barrier for the first experience.” Subscriptions now deliver 65%-70% of digital revenue, up from 25%-30%, and cuts hit travel, not journalism.

Jodie’s blog on super-user maths supplies the caution. The 1% of paid subscribers drive 27% of pageviews, per INMA Subscription Benchmark Services. Serve them, she says, but ask whether that 1% is defined by passion for your brand or by the ability to pay — and run two scorecards:

• Retention and lifetime value for today’s business.
• Reach among younger audiences and engagement away from owned products for tomorrow’s.

Current data runs today’s business. It does not describe tomorrow’s market.

Nikkei shows what the first business can build from its own archive. and nothing else: 500,000 readers, 4 million questions, nearly 90% rated helpful — for under 1% of the digital edition’s cloud bill.

The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson told Peter Kafka that “Google is sending us fewer people who aren’t going to subscribe,” and The Guardian reported record revenue of £282 million.

The insight: The first business is in the best shape it has ever been, and every winner got there the same way — direct, deliberate, and expensive to leave. Protect it. Just don’t mistake its customers for the market.

The business being built somewhere else

At VG, Norway’s biggest news site, only 12%-13% of front-page exposure goes to paid content. Camilla Brække’s workflow around Videofy — Schibsted’s now open-sourced text-to-video tool — turns premium stories into 30-second vertical videos, reviewed by journalists before publication. More than 20% of viewers click through to the article; one sleep-hack story drew 477,990 TikTok views and a 23.5% click-through. “The short video is not the product; it is a bridge into the journalism.”

Ippen Digital’s The.Lab built NewsConnect — branded, interactive content apps living inside ChatGPT — and scaled it from one pilot to 80-plus brands and 29 million monthly readers: “The source is not a footnote. It is the experience.”

The evidence that this business exists came from two directions. Ofcom found 21% of British adults use AI for news, and that publishers’ own Web sites get eight of the 72 minutes Britons spend with news each day. The Reuters Institute’s six-country study, flagged by Sonali Verma, found a quarter of the public now counts creators, podcasts, and short video as news — a third of 18- to 24-year-olds count content creators as news providers.

Also from INMA: Condé Nast’s Holly Johnson on the five loops that make habit a product strategy, and Good Food on selling expertise amid free content.

The insight: The second business is not a marketing channel for the first. VG’s video is a bridge, Ippen’s apps are a destination, SPILNEWS is a company. The habits are forming in places you don’t own.

The machines’ money

Gabe’s two blogs kept the ledger on the second business’ money. OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads hit a US$1 billion annualised run rate 200 days after its first test — 2.5% of OpenAI’s total, and well short of its US$2.5 billion target. Agentic trading is crawling — pubX moves US$2,000-US$3,000 a day — but demand is heading for direct IOs, sponsorships, and PMPs. Gabe’s advice stands: Be legible, help write the rules, build your own seller agent.

Jodie’s blog asks the question underneath: As AI compresses discovery, comparison, and purchase into one conversation, who gets paid for influencing the decision?

The referees moved, too. Judge Leonie Brinkema’s unsealed remedies in the Google ad tech case reject a break-up for behavioural rules — AdX bidding into rival ad servers on equal terms, and a monitor for six years. And Google’s “AI contribution pilot” began paying publishers whose content shapes AI Overviews — sums one executive called “peanuts.”

The insight: The second business has audiences and no settled payment terms. Someone has to name the price of a journalist’s influence inside a machine’s answer, and it will not be the machine.

What it means for your company

Distil the week, and you get three sentences:

• The business that pays is healthy wherever it is run as a direct, deliberate relationship — and Corriere proved it need not cost you reach.
• The business that comes next is being built by units that sit outside the newsroom, decide in weeks, and measure reach where habits form.
• Its money is unsettled — machine ads, agentic deals, licensing pilots — so the terms will be written by whoever turns up to write them.

Three decisions for this month: Give the second business its own P&L, scorecard, and reporting line to the board, as Mediahuis and The Washington Post did — and, as a Summit poll suggested, six months to show something. Put Jodie’s second set of measures on the executive dashboard, and stop grading social video on subscriptions. And decide what you charge for a journalist’s influence inside an AI answer before a platform decides it for you.

Dates for the diary

• September 21-25: INMA Media Innovation Week, Madrid (study tour September 21-22, conference September 23-25).
• September 30: INMA Webinar with 20 Minuten’s Basil Honegger on vertical video.
• October 1: INMA Africa Audience Development Summit.
• October 8-15: Sonali’s Newsroom and AI Master Class.
• October 14: Gabe’s Webinar: advertising transformation in one hour.
• October 19-23: Jodie’s INMA Media Tech & AI Week, San Francisco (study tour October 19-21, conference October 22-23).
• October 21: Greg’s Webinar with Inbox Collective’s Dan Oshinsky on the AI-powered inbox.
• November 5, 10, and 12: Greg’s Subscriber Acquisition Master Class.
• December 7-10: INMA Media Advertising Summit, New York (study tour December 7-8, conference December 9-10).
• February 19-26, 2027: Jodie’s Product Strategy for Agentic Media Master Class.
• March 8-12, 2027: INMA Media Subscriptions Summit, Oslo.

Which leaves one question for your executive team: If the audience that will fund you in 2030 never arrives at your front door — who in your company is paid to go and meet it?

The Distillation is INMA’s weekly read on where the news business is going based on our content. Available as a blog, a newsletter, and a podcast.

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