Newsrooms know where they need to go. The hard part is getting there.

When FT Strategies, in partnership with WAN-IFRA and supported by Arc XP, published the Future Newsrooms Study 2026 earlier this month, the industry reaction was not surprise so much as recognition.

Based on responses from 448 newsroom leaders across 86 countries, the study seeks to provide an evidence-based answer to how news organisations are navigating the period of profound change: redefining and executing strategy, integrating AI into newsroom workflows, allocating resources to growth areas and building the skills for the years ahead.

If, like me, you’ve held a newsroom transformation or bridge role, you’ll know this isn’t easy work. It is often slowed down by competing priorities, legacy structures, cultural resistance and the constant pressure of daily publishing.

The report brings this challenge to life by identifying four connected gaps — strategy, audience trust, capability and skills — that continue to prevent newsrooms from translating their ambition into execution. Strikingly, only a third of respondents reported strong alignment between their organisational strategy and day-to-day editorial decision-making.

As MediaStack’s John Rahim summed it up, newsrooms know what they need to do, but are not doing it. His reaction was just one of dozens from newsroom executives and industry leaders that we’ve bucketed below into five key themes:

1. Strategy is no longer the challenge. Execution is

For many report readers, the most striking finding was not that newsrooms need a strategy, but that so few have managed to operationalise one. The discussion quickly zeroed in on the ways that newsrooms (try to) turn an ambitious plan into action: audience or revenue targets, regular meetings and leadership communication.

Former Metro.co.uk audience growth director and fractional consultant Sofia Victoria Delgado picked up on the finding that 45% of newsrooms use data as a lagging metric, reviewed only after publication. Her point was that the deeper barrier is not just tools or dashboards, but certainty about which KPIs to look at, why they matter and how they connect to wider strategy.

Felicitas Carrique, executive director at the News Product Alliance, described the gap as “infrastructural”. Many organisations already have a strategy; what they lack are the habits, routines and decision-making structures that make it executable under pressure. Few newsroom veterans would disagree with her.

2. Audience-first ideas are widespread but not embedded

The report confirms that audience engagement is now core to many newsrooms’ ambitions. In fact, it is the most commonly selected top-three goal in 2026, although business sustainability remains the highest weighted priority.

However, the data shows that most newsrooms still develop stories for a primary channel first and adapt them elsewhere. Similarly, only 1 in 5 stories begin with a defined user need or audience group — much less than the current “audience-first” rhetoric might suggest.

The Listening Post Collective’s Grace Northern described this as newsrooms prioritising “destination-first” workflows, where community need is reverse-engineered after the fact. Camilla Bath, who leads the World Press Institute’s programs, made the same point: if the process starts with a channel, platform or format, the audience is not truly first.

The upshot of this is not that newsrooms have failed to understand audience needs — many do know what different audience segments care about — but rather that the understanding has not yet been embedded into the way that newsrooms operate.

3. The next newsroom advantage is reader relationships

The report’s Community Era framing — which outlined how media advantage has moved from controlled distribution, to search intent, to platform visibility, and now towards relationship strength — resonated with a host of people who read the report.

The Financial Times’ Hannah Sarney — who was a member of the report’s Advisory Board — described the report as making a compelling case that newsrooms are moving beyond publishing towards participation, relationships and community-building. Renee Kaplan — another Advisory Board member and head of French partnerships for Substack — echoed this, arguing that news now needs to add up to more than the sum of its information.

That’s not to say this shift won’t be an operational challenge. The survey finds that reporters currently spend only 11% of their time on post-publication work such as community engagement, audience feedback and analytics, compared with 38% on production. That has to change.

4. AI shouldn’t be used to make bad decisions, faster

The report discovered that 42% of newsrooms use time saved as their primary measure of AI success. It warns that this can trap organisations in an efficiency frame: doing the same work faster, rather than building new editorial capability.

Bath put the risk bluntly: if most newsrooms start without the audience in the room, and AI is mainly measured by efficiency, then AI risks helping them do the wrong thing faster. That bears thinking about.

Delgado connected the AI challenge to the importance of newsroom strategy, communication and culture. After skills gaps, the report identifies cultural resistance and unclear use cases as the biggest barriers to AI adoption. Her conclusion was that newsrooms need a destination and clarity on which KPIs to pay attention to. In her words: “You can have the best engine room and still be steering an alcohol-fuelled cruise ship putting on a variety show.”

WordPress VIP’s Nate Kelly noted that roles that newsrooms are hiring for, including “Senior Editor, AI Innovation” and “Editorial Director, Newsroom Engineering”, show that they are using AI not to do things faster but to produce “better, more distinctive work”.

5. The future newsroom depends on investment in people

One of the key report findings was that confidence in current newsroom skills falls when leaders look three or more years ahead.

That could be in part because of the overwhelming list of priority skills that the survey highlighted, including tech-enabled journalism, audience engagement, production expertise, subject expertise, data analysis and project management. Arteveldehogeschool’s Tomas Ooms added the need for OSINT, AI prompting, off-site distribution, trend monitoring and production-based skills.

But the report also demonstrated that it’s not just the type of skills required but the level of investment needed in structured training. As an example, many newsrooms reported trying to make existing staff more ‘creator-like’, but two-thirds offer limited training to do so.

It is reasonable for newsrooms to ask journalists to become more audience-literate, AI-literate, format-fluent and commercially aware. But this shift requires budget and organisational commitment to developing the capabilities that future newsrooms rely on.

The reaction to the Future Newsrooms Study points to one larger conclusion: the industry is not short of ambition. Newsrooms know they need deeper audience relationships, clearer strategy, smarter AI use and stronger skills. The challenge is turning that knowledge into practice.