--- title: Five ways to win at news description: How to succeed in the age of AI --- [![logo (2)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(2).svg)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/) [![logo (3)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(3).svg)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/) - [Home](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/en-gb/) - [Advisory](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/advisory) - [121 Consulting](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/121-consulting) - [Content Review](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/contentreview) - [Testimonials](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/testimonial) - [Contact](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/contact-us) # Five ways to win at news [Alan Hunter](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/author/alan-hunter) 22 August 2025 9 min read **How to succeed in the age of AI** What are the non-negotiables for news organisations of the future? What qualities will they need to have a chance of being successful? We can’t, of course, know for sure, but I have been sense-checking some thoughts with industry colleagues over the summer and think there are broad areas in which publishers need to excel. To be clear, I’m not talking about things that are really the price of admission, such as having a culture that’s open to experimentation, a deep understanding of their audiences and an obsession with data. Instead I’m talking about their wider market-level characteristics. Here’s what I think will define successful news organisations in the near future: 1 They are niche This almost fits into the category of “price of admission”. I love quoting Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, formerly of the Reuters Institute and now of the University of Copenhagen, who a few years ago said: “There are two kinds of publishers: niche publishers who know they are niche publishers and publishers who are niche publishers but don’t yet know it.” This feels more pertinent by the day. Unless you, as a news provider, can offer deeper insight than an AI-generated answer, you’re going to have real trouble sustaining a business. This is a big issue for generalist publishers. Maybe not for a while, but it will be down the road when AI usage is ubiquitous like smartphones are today. Why go to a publication that can give you a surface-level view on a topic when that news is much easier to access via an AI interface? And to which you can ask follow-up questions about the news event or its background? You can see the advantages of niche publishing in the kind of digital news start-ups that have been successful. Almost universally they are, like Politico, The Information and The Athletic, based around a tightly defined area rather than generalist, such as the much diminished BuzzFeed and Vice. 2 They are expert With the niche focus comes a requirement for expertise. If I am going to pay for a news service – and I probably will have to pay, if it’s not state funded – then I’m going to expect the most insightful, most up to date and most useful content about that subject. Realistically, I don’t want a whole load of sources; I want one, and for it to be definitive. People are already thinking like this. One chief executive told us that his vision for the future of his company involved “hiring reporters who are world experts in their field and doing everything else with AI”. The key point I took from that was the “world experts”. Do you have enough of them in your newsroom at the moment? 3 They are building communities Smart publishers are doing this already and, as social media descends into grubby, unmoderated rantospheres, there is an opportunity to provide safer spaces to connect people with passions about particular subjects – see “They are niche” and “They are expert” above. And building communities reflects the intolerance of readers for being told “this is the news because we say it is the news”. I’m sure this is behind a lot of news avoidance. Increasingly, people want to have a two-way conversation about the news and they’ll flock to places where they can have one. The publishers who can host and moderate this conversation will reap huge benefits. 4 They are lean This is unavoidable and a bit distressing for those of us who have worked our whole careers in big, bustling newsrooms, and smaller ones that hummed with life in their own way. But the process of reducing the size of news operations that began 20 years ago will continue to the point where they can’t get any smaller and produce the kind of journalism I described above. We don’t have the enormous revenues of print to sustain them any more. Nor will we ever have them again. Instead, we need to find the right blend of human expertise and technology to ensure that we are producing content of the quality and volume to satisfy our audiences. Previously, in print days, we didn’t really know whether we were doing that. Now we can and we’ll have to make sure we are doing so every single day. 5 They will be AI-enabled in a way that will astonish you Their chief AI officer, or equivalent, will have been given free rein to experiment. There will be no nonsense about “not using AI in any of our journalism” (note: even if you think you’re not, you already are!). New products in new formats will be emerging on a weekly basis. Ideas for how agents will access your content will have been thought through and developed. New tools will have dramatically speeded up the production process. Finally, the archive, which publishing executives have long imagined to be a pot of gold, might actually have some value. Crucially, discussions will have been had about how reporters need to change their ways of working in the age of AI. They won’t just be filing text-based stories, or sending over videos, or audio clips – they will be doing all of the above, and AI tools will be reformatting their reporting into multiple versions. I don’t know about you but I find this all a very exciting prospect. The disruptive nature of the environment means there are huge opportunities for anyone with an idea – and this time they don’t need huge amounts of capital behind them. If I were a young journalist, I’d be thinking about how I could make my fortune outside a traditional publisher. The challenge for those legacy organisations is to stay one step ahead. Anyway, that was a long email this week. I hope it stimulates some ideas. This kind of transformation is exactly the kind of job that we at HBM Advisory love. So if you want help with yours, please message us at info@hbmadvisory.com ## Next blog post ## [Ice warning](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/ice-warning) [Read more](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/ice-warning) ![logo (2)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(2).svg) Hunter Brunt Media Ltd. 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