The BBC has launched a paid subscription for its news website in the United States, marking a significant shift as it seeks to diversify revenue amid growing pressure on its traditional funding model. American users will now be asked to pay $49.99 a year or $8.99 a month for unlimited access to articles, in-depth reports and a 24-hour livestream of BBC News programming. The move comes as the UK’s licence fee – the main source of public funding for the BBC – faces declining revenue. The fee, currently £174.50 per household, is under review by the British government, which wants…

It would be so easy to stand in line, nod solemnly and pretend this new set of synthetic media guidelines is flawless. But someone has to push back on behalf of the industry, so here I am. The report in question comes from Partnership on AI, a major global AI and media ethics group, and is supported by organisations with genuinely good intentions. It lays out thoughtful, well-structured principles for how publishers should handle synthetic media, including the need for traceable sourcing, contextual information, human oversight and heightened safeguards around elections, child safety and manipulated visuals. I agree with…

Axel Springer is aiming to double its value within five years, with a bold plan built around artificial intelligence, platform independence and clearly stated political values. The ambition was laid out by CEO Mathias Döpfner at the company’s first major strategy meeting since its transformation back into a private media business. More than 100 top executives gathered in Berlin to hear how Springer plans to position itself as the leading provider of AI-powered journalism in what Döpfner called “the free world”. “Journalism remains our core, but it’s evolving,” said Döpfner. “The business model of maximising clicks and advertising is over.…

News publishers in India are asking the same questions and facing the same issues as those in the US and Europe was the conclusion after two days of discussions and presentations at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media India conference in Chennai this week. They may be only just starting to face falling print circulations – another victim of Covid – but otherwise they are still looking at how best to monetise their digital content and utilise artificial intelligence. There were questions about scale and subscriptions, AI and audiences. “Do you really need 200-300m users to build sustainability? Can you do it…

In our keynote talk yesterday at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media India in Chennai, Michael, my co-founder at HBM Advisory, and I set out a practical framework for managing change in newsrooms. We began by acknowledging the context: print is fading fast – even in South Asia, where it had appeared resilient until the pandemic – at the same time as AI is upending distribution, from ChatGPT to Google’s AI Overviews and soon AI Mode, reducing referral traffic and breaking long-standing assumptions about how audiences reach our journalism. And yet we believe that, while many have made great progress, newsroom cultures…

The launch of the Reuters Digital News Report is always a highlight of the media-gazing year. The latest edition, published on Monday, also marks a key point in the evolution of digital news. For the first time in the US, social media and video platforms edged past traditional television and news websites as the main source of news following the January 2025 presidential inauguration. This underscores the platform preferences of younger users and the rising influence of alternative voices in the information ecosystem. The change, detected in post-inauguration survey data, reflects a tipping point in the US media landscape…

The Washington Post is in talks with Substack about a potential collaboration that would allow it to broaden its opinion coverage by tapping into the newsletter platform’s network of independent writers. The move, confirmed by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie in an interview with The Guardian, signals a notable shift in how legacy media views a platform it once regarded with suspicion. Substack, which enables writers to monetise their work directly through subscriptions, has grown rapidly in recent years and is now seen by some traditional publishers as a source of fresh talent and audience engagement. “There’s been a change in…

A new study commissioned by German media rights group Corint Media has reignited debate over how publishers should be compensated for their content in an era of AI-driven search. The report claims Google rightly owes German publishers €1.3 billion annually for using journalistic material in features like AI Overviews. At the centre of the dispute is Google’s use of AI-generated summaries in search results to answer queries directly on the page. Media organisations say this deprives them of referral traffic, undermining a key source of funding for journalism. The study (published in German), produced by consulting firm FehrAdvice & Partners,…

Taboola has launched a generative AI answer engine called DeeperDive that aims to help publishers compete with AI-powered search while giving users richer, more contextual responses to their questions. The technology is being adopted in the US by Gannett and the USA Today Network, and in the UK by The Independent. It is designed to work across Taboola’s network of 9,000 publishing partners, responding to user queries with answers drawn from the publisher’s own content and enriched with links to related stories. The goal, according to the company, is to encourage deeper engagement on publisher websites and reclaim ground lost…

Le Monde Group celebrated its 80th anniversary with record-breaking subscription figures that signal growing public appetite for trusted journalism. In an article published this week, the group’s CEO Louis Dreyfus and his fellow director Jérôme Fenoglio, highlighted that daily paid circulation is now the highest in its history, at above 530,000 copies, and well beyond the 1978 peak of 440,000 reached during a moment of intense political engagement in France. This growth has been driven by a clear focus on building digital subscriptions. Revenue from digital readers is now so substantial that it is expected to cover the full cost…