Everyone’s Talking About AI Skills. 61% of Newsrooms Spend Nothing on Training.
A 450-response global benchmark on the distance between what newsrooms say and what they fund.
At the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille, FT Strategies launched the first instalment of its Future of the Newsrooms Study 2026, a global benchmark designed to track how newsrooms are actually changing, beyond what they say about themselves. The distinction matters more than it might seem.
Lisa MacLeod, Director at FT Strategies, has been working on the study for most of the year. It draws on roughly 450 survey responses from 86 countries, supplemented by interviews, publisher workshops, and an advisory board spanning journalism, academia, product, and media leadership. WAN-IFRA partnered on the research; Arc XP sponsored it.
The goal, as MacLeod framed it, was to ask a harder question than the industry usually asks itself: not whether newsrooms have a strategy, but whether that strategy is shaping what gets commissioned, invested in, or cut.
The answer, broadly, is no.
The community era, and the gap before it
The study’s central argument is that newsrooms are entering what FT Strategies calls “the community era.” When generic content becomes cheap to produce at scale, competitive advantage shifts to whatever is harder to replicate. For publishers, that means original journalism, trusted relationships, and loyal communities built around them.
MacLeod’s qualifier was equally direct. “I know this sounds obvious. We’ve heard it many, many times. What is very clear in the data is that that is not happening.” The phrases that fill conference sessions, “audience first,” “meet them where they are,” “value over volume,” are not translating into practice. The study identifies four areas where the gap is most acute: strategy, trust, capability, and skills.
Strategy: the commissioning problem
The first gap is between stated priorities and daily editorial decisions. Newsrooms are increasingly recognising engagement as a strategic metric, an acknowledgement that high-traffic days are not a sustainable business model. Audience engagement, sustainability, and reach all rank among the top stated goals for 2026.
A quarter of newsrooms, however, report that editorial priorities remain largely reactive, driven by news judgement rather than any wider organisational plan. The commissioning process is where this shows up most clearly.
MacLeod described commissioning as “the unlocker for value in newsrooms,” but the data suggests it is being left locked. Commissioning is still predominantly destination-first: journalists file for a single channel, and repurposing happens afterwards. Data is used to evaluate coverage after publication, rather than to shape decisions before it.
“There’s a big joke that the Olympics sneak up on us every four years,” she said. The joke wasn’t flippant. The inability to plan for predictable events is a symptom of a deeper problem: strategy exists at the organisational level but does not consistently inform what gets made.
Newsrooms with stronger alignment between strategy and editorial decision-making are slightly more likely to involve audience-facing roles in setting long-term priorities: heads of audience engagement, platforms, or community functions. Only one in ten currently includes a dedicated strategy role in that process.
Trust: the workflow that does not match the rhetoric
The second gap sits between what newsrooms say about audience relationships and how journalists spend their time.
The study mapped journalist time across the production cycle. Most of it still goes on production: writing, editing, fact-checking, formatting, publishing. Pre-publication planning and post-publication audience engagement receive a fraction of the time, despite years of investment in automation tools designed to relieve that burden.
MacLeod was pointed about it: “When newsrooms talk about deeper audience relationships, their workflow is still optimised for getting the story out, not learning from what happens after.”
On storytelling formats, the data shows a strong preference for explainers, fact-checks, and background pieces. MacLeod offered a sceptical read. She suspects the enthusiasm for explainers is partly a proxy for wanting to reach younger audiences, and that the assumption young readers need things explained to them is worth examining.
Capability: technology that is not trusted
The third gap concerns whether newsrooms have the tools and structures to deliver on their ambitions. Most are not confident that their current technology stack is fit for purpose or future-proof. Twenty per cent say it is not fit for purpose at all.
On AI, the most common measure of success is time saved. MacLeod does not find this encouraging. The barriers to wider AI adoption are not primarily about the tools themselves: they are about culture: scepticism among staff, unclear use cases, and a lack of strategic direction. Framing AI investment primarily as a mechanism for reducing headcount is, she argued, too narrow. “The challenge is really to move beyond seeing AI only as an assistant for speeding up tasks.”
Skills: confidence today, anxiety about tomorrow
The fourth gap is temporal. Newsrooms express reasonable confidence in their current skills. That confidence erodes sharply when they look three years ahead.
Most newsrooms are still organised around traditional desk structures, politics, business, culture, sport, rather than around audience behaviour, which is increasingly niche and format-driven. The challenge is less about hiring new skills than rethinking how existing ones are organised.
The skills most prioritised for future readiness are hybrid ones: editorial judgement combined with technical fluency, audience understanding, and operational capability across formats. The “bridge role,” someone who can move between editorial and product, between journalism and technology, keeps surfacing as the figure newsrooms say they need but struggle to build at scale.
The study also found broad support for some form of differentiated compensation for journalists whose personal brands and audience relationships generate disproportionate value, including higher base salaries, performance bonuses, and, in some cases, revenue share.
61% spend nothing on training.
The finding MacLeod returned to in her closing summary was the one that sat most awkwardly alongside everything else. Despite the acknowledged pace of change, the stated urgency around AI, and the widespread concern about skills readiness, 61% of newsrooms in the study report spending nothing on training.
“That just represents a really big disconnect between where we think we should be and where we’re going.”
The session also featured Gard Steiro, Editor-in-Chief and CEO of Norway’s VG, who offered a practical counterpoint: a detailed account of VG’s experimental unit VGX, a small fast-moving team operating outside the constraints of the main newsroom and building AI-native products designed to inform what the wider organisation does next. Jens Pettersson of NTM Sweden chaired proceedings and drew both threads together around the recruitment question. The emerging consensus: the most valuable hire is no longer the social media specialist or the video producer, but the journalist with deep domain knowledge, strong sources, and the willingness to work differently.
The FT Strategies study will be repeated annually. Whether the numbers move will be the test of whether this year’s conversations translate into anything more than that.