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Every year, media and publishing professionals around the world look out for Nieman Lab’s annual predictions.
Written by some of the smartest and most experienced voices in the industry, the series offers a snapshot of where journalism, and the broader information ecosystem, is heading. For many senior leaders, it’s a chance to understand what forces are likely to shape the year ahead.
The 2026 predictions are no different. They span shifting audience behaviours, emerging content formats and complex platform dynamics alongside questions of newsroom trust, artificial intelligence, creator collaborations and, crucially, the changing economics of journalism.
But, with more than 200 predictions, it’s difficult to know where to start. That’s why the FT Strategies team has curated a selection of predictions that senior media leaders and executives should prioritise reading, and explains why they matter over the next 12 months.
Jump straight to a featured prediction below:
Lisa MacLeod, Director
I'm a huge fan of Nicholas Thompson, and I read or watch all of his updates on LinkedIn. His Nieman prediction about AI companies paying for training and displaying content is very much in line with the views of our clients at FT Strategies. Thompson nails the fundamental tension: AI companies are extracting enormous value from quality journalism while publishers see an ongoing decline in traffic, and subsequently in revenue, not least because AI overviews are making discovery harder.
For our clients — many of whom are premium publishers investing heavily in original reporting and analysis — this extractive model is unsustainable in the longer term. They can't fund the journalism that makes AI models valuable if AI search keeps readers in walled gardens. I'm optimistic that 2026 will bring a much-needed reckoning. The best AI companies will realise that killing off their information sources is self-defeating for both parties. Fair attribution, revenue sharing, and traffic referrals aren't just ethical imperatives, they're business necessities for AI's long-term success.
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Adriana Whiteley, Director
As AI reshapes the information ecosystem, one of the most consequential shifts ahead is what Robin Kwong describes as information becoming malleable. To me, this goes far beyond today’s idea of “liquid content,” which is often limited to AI-generated summaries, chatbots or low-value repurposing.
Once information becomes designed for reuse, a new set of monetisable opportunities emerges, particularly for B2B publishers. Content can function as an input rather than a finished product, potentially powering private LLM access, customised reporting and data visualisation, sentiment analysis, and AI-driven products such as niche newsletters and intelligence tools. The Economist and the Financial Times are just two publishers that have already explored this model, and I expect others to follow suit — not only to monetise existing content and assets, but also to serve audience clusters that were previously too small or too costly to sustain.
My prediction, then, is that value will shift from publishing outputs to building information infrastructure such as proprietary datasets, content taxonomies and APIs that allow others to create their own outputs. Publishers that build for this kind of usage will be best positioned to lead in this next phase.
George Adelman, Director
In the age of AI, there is a growing tendency to emphasise its potential to democratise access to information, scale and expertise. In practice, however, our work consistently shows that the real fault line is unequal access to resources and capabilities. As AI advances, the risk is that these benefits are likely to be felt only among larger, well-resourced newsrooms.
Dale Anglin, CEO of Press Forward, is therefore right to point out that local networks matter more than ever in the quest for local news sustainability. Networked approaches often build on shared infrastructure and peer connections that allow knowledge, skills and best practice to circulate and evolve far faster than any single organisation could manage alone.
Funding networks can accelerate this work, acting as catalysts for shared capabilities and collective innovation that would be out of reach for individual newsrooms. It might take time and investment, but I believe this networked approach is how sustainability becomes both more achievable and more equitable across the news sector.
Lettie Debenham, Principal
As generative AI floods the information ecosystem with summaries, answers and auto-generated content, the problem that audiences face is no longer access to information, but knowing what to pay attention to. That is why Rubina Madan Fillion’s AI turns the firehose into a funnel prediction stands out to me.
The head of AI Initiatives at the New York Times argues that AI will not reward publishers who simply produce more, but instead those who help audiences by filtering, prioritising and providing context. In practice, this means moving beyond volume-driven publishing towards experiences that reduce cognitive load and guide decision-making, something that we have worked with news and wider publishing clients to achieve.
Rubina’s prediction calls into question long-held assumptions about scale, metrics and differentiation. In an AI-mediated environment, value will increasingly sit with organisations that can turn noise into clarity. Ensuring your organisation does so will be a defining strategic challenge of the years ahead.
Alexandra Terizakis, Principal
We’re starting to see a shift in how our clients approach AI: from experimenting and deploying loose, disconnected applications across the news production cycle to reconfiguring their business models around the productivity and distribution. To mark this evolution, we’re proud to be working with the Google News Initiative on a seminal programme this year, supporting publishers to assess their current capabilities and transform their organisations to effectively scale AI. It’s also why I was particularly excited to read Nikita Roy’s prediction
Emanuele Porfiri, Head of Analytics
As a data specialist, and a fan of (safe and transparent) ambiguity and provocation, my favourite prediction is Jason Forrest’s argument that data should drive conversations, not division. He makes a strong case that “the next generation of data communicators in journalism will need a different skill mix than the last generation of data visualizers”. Statistics, code, and design will remain essential but he posits that they will also need interviewing, facilitation, and what he calls “the empathy to accept that the audience brings indispensable context that any dataset could never capture.” The questions for many newsrooms leaders will be: Have you got those skills in your team, and if not, what are you doing to build them?
Aliya Itzkowitz, Senior Manager
In 2024, I submitted an entry to the Journalism Futures Project in which I argued that future journalists would be ‘paid per scoop.’ I imagined a Spotify-like scenario in which writers and producers would, in the fight for compensation for their work, track the provenance of information via a blockchain ledger and receive money every time their work is quoted.
That’s why I was so excited to read Ryan Kellett’s Nieman prediction. Ryan uses the analogy of Taylor Swift’s songwriter rights to advocate for a rethink of ownership in publishing. He argues that creators “deserve to own and keep rights associated with that work” and cites the fediverse and Real Simple Licensing as initiatives attempting to solve this.
Some in the news industry will find the music analogy tired or overused. While it has its shortcomings, it provides us a template of a creative industry that reinvented itself when distribution was broken. Which reminds me, if your New Year’s Resolution is to read more, try Tarzan Economics by Will Page.
Brundan Haran, Senior Manager
The trend toward revenue diversification within the news industry is not just prudent, it’s foundational. Our recent research has shown that the most resilient local news organisations don’t rely on one or two income streams, but design for three or four meaningful sources of revenue, treating diversification as a structural advantage rather than a fallback plan.
What’s striking is the shift in mindset this demands. In an environment where audience journeys start across platforms, AI tools, newsletters, messaging apps and live spaces, product and journalism content must be built with monetisation in mind. The question is no longer “how do we fund the newsroom?” but “what value does this create, and where does revenue flow from?. In 2026, sustainability won’t come from chasing scale, but from designing journalism, and business models, that compound value across audiences, partners and platforms.
Gareth Welsh, Senior Manager
I agree with LaSharah S. Bunting’s prediction that the newsrooms that will pull ahead in 2026 will be those that have built the muscle to operate across multiple possible futures, rather than optimising for a single path. Part of that means approaching the famous ‘build versus buy’ question differently, shifting it from a theoretical debate to a day-to-day operating decision.
We see this in our own work, where clients are showing a growing reluctance to commit to intensive, bespoke builds that reduce their ability to execute. Buying proven, well-priced tools off the shelf provides a steadier foundation and allows teams to test, adapt and respond more quickly as market conditions change. Yes, the trade-offs are real when deciding what to buy, but the advantage will go to organisations that treat technology vendor choices as core infrastructure, on a par with their CMS or revenue strategy. In practice, knowing the tech vendor ecosystem — and how each partner might serve your strategy —is more essential than ever.
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Preet Braich, Talent and Resourcing Manager
Danielle C. Belton, the former editor-in-chief of HuffPost and The Root, uses her Nieman prediction to remind us of the dangers of sacrificing Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in newsrooms. She recalls how the post-2020 moment, triggered by a brief surge of enthusiastic, if somewhat suspicious, corporate commitment, has rapidly unravelled as a result of dwindling revenues and shifting political winds. By quietly dismantling roles and shedding the people who bring diverse perspectives into the newsroom, the outcome is not only a moral failure, but an editorial one.
Sobering as it may read, Belton’s prediction also serves as a call-to-action. If newsrooms are serious about reversing this cycle in 2026 and beyond, DEI must be treated as editorial infrastructure rather than reputational window-dressing. This means protecting it during downturns, embedding it in leadership and commissioning decisions, and, ultimately, promoting it as essential to credibility, trust and long-term relevance.
Lamberto Lambertini, Insights Manager
Everyone is finally paying attention to YouTube – and by everyone, I mean publishing media executives. For a long time dismissed as just another social media, the video behemoth is actually the future of TV and also its present; as reported last year, “TV is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S”, crucially above smartphones. In the UK, it is second only to the BBC for TV usage. It's no wonder that legacy media players are acquiring digital startups, in part for their YouTube audience.
That’s why my favourite Nieman prediction of 2026 is John Lee’s ‘Journalism will become the center of gravity for YouTube’s next era’. As he notes, “YouTube doesn’t need journalism to boost ad revenue. It needs journalism to anchor its reputational power in the same way newspapers once anchored civic life”. This is where the opportunity becomes mutual. YouTube needs trusted journalism to mature as a civic platform; publishers need YouTube to reach mass audiences. When news organisations take YouTube seriously, strategically, not tactically, both sides stand to gain. Here is to a year in which that realisation finally takes hold.
Ben Whitelaw, Manager
One of the takeaways from our Next Gen News research was younger audiences’ desire for authenticity. We found that 18-24 year olds are drawn to creators like Faye D’Souza, Andrew Callaghan and David Hundeyin as a result of the intimacy that comes with putting themselves in the story. It’s this opportunity that Bill Adair, founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact, refers to in his Nieman prediction. He takes aim at current journalistic practices that often “rob the stories of their humanity” and points out that, when news publishers try to offer a glimpse behind the curtain of commissioning or production, such stories are rare. Adair points instead to successful content franchises like Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which have attracted huge new audiences to the sport by providing unparalleled access and explaining how the sport works in simple, understandable terms. Can news publishers do the same?
Thinking about what these shifts mean for your organisation? FT Strategies works with media and publishing leaders to translate industry signals, from AI economics to audience behaviour and newsroom transformation, into a clear, actionable strategy. We partner with organisations to assess their capabilities and build resilient revenue and operating models. To find out more about how we can support you, please get in touch with our expert team today.
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