FT Strategies on AI, M&A and the Publishing Survival Guide
How Adriana Whiteley on how FT Strategies is helping publishers navigate existential threats, AI vulnerability assessments, and the dangerous comfort of building in-house.
TL;DR: Key Takeaways
AI vulnerability is now a valuation metric. FT Strategies assesses which revenue streams can be replaced by AI when advising on M&A deals; if your content can be easily reconstructed by LLMs, your asset value plummets.
The “human slop” problem is real. Formulaic reporting and press-release rewrites are dead. Publishers must elevate unique voices, authority, and distinctive quality that AI can’t replicate.
Publishers are still too insular and slow. The industry talks to itself, builds in-house when it should buy, and many newsrooms still aren’t truly digital-first let alone AI-first.
Horizontal M&A is the survival strategy. Revenue diversification through acquisitions (events companies, data firms, analytics platforms) is how publishers build resilience against AI disruption.
AI is under-hyped, not over-hyped. Whiteley argues we’re underestimating AI’s long-term impact. The experimentation phase is over adapt fundamentally or decline.
Action items for publishers: Audit which revenues AI can replace, own your audience through first-party data, use AI to uncover micro-communities in your archives, and stop waiting to see what the FT does next.
The Publishing Industry’s Self-Awareness Problem
The publishing industry has a self-awareness problem. It’s not short on confidence, there’s plenty of that but it often struggles to look beyond its own bubble. According to Adriana Whiteley, Director of Strategy and M&A at FT Strategies, the sector remains “very inward-looking” and dangerously slow to adapt. FT Strategies owned by The Financial Times, has worked with more than 900 publishing clients in over 80 countries
“News companies speak to other news companies, B2B publishers speak to other B2B publishers,” she says. “They tend to be quite an insular sector that speaks to itself a lot but often doesn’t look outside.” The result is predictable: innovation moves at a glacial pace until a major player like the Financial Times acts, and others scramble to follow.
AI has now broken that cycle. The experimentation phase is over, Whiteley argues, and publishers face a binary choice: adapt fundamentally or decline. After 25 years in TMT strategy consulting across telecoms, broadcast and media, she’s seen this film before and knows how it ends for those who move too slowly.
Whiteley pauses, then adds a broader observation. “It’s an industry that still believes it can control its own pace of change. But technology doesn’t wait for permission.” Her diagnosis reflects a familiar truth about publishing’s culture: for all its creativity, it is structurally conservative. Decisions are made by consensus. Product development happens in increments. And many executives still defined by print-era hierarchies are more comfortable discussing deadlines than data.
How AI Is Reshaping Publishing Valuations
FT Strategies has introduced a new element into its M&A advisory work: an AI vulnerability assessment. When evaluating potential acquisitions, they now analyse what they call the “map of revenues” to determine how much income could be replaced by AI systems.
“If those activities or those types of revenues can be easily replaced by specialist AI tools or general chatbots, the value is much lower,” says Whiteley. “If you’re a private equity firm buying that publication, you have to take that into consideration.”
Adriana Whiteley, Director of Strategy and M&A at FT Strategies
This marks a fundamental shift in asset valuation. It’s no longer just about audience reach, brand strength or historical revenue. There’s now a new line item existential risk from artificial intelligence.
The threat is particularly acute in B2B publishing, where AI systems already replicate services once owned by specialist titles such as market rankings, data summaries and sector analyses.
“There’s that analyst we used to wait for to see who they’d say was the biggest in the market,” she notes. “Now everybody just asks the LLM. If your content can be easily reconstructed from public information, by reorganisation of data that’s already available, you’re in trouble.”
Whiteley leans forward as she explains how this changes M&A logic. “The value does not depend only on the target’s current audience and brand strength,” she says, “it’s about whether its revenue streams are resilient.” In other words, acquirers are now pricing in automation risk, a concept that could rapidly become standard practice across media transactions.
For publishers, that means more than valuation pressure. It forces a rethink of the content they produce, the value propositions they sell, and the strategic partnerships they pursue.
Buying Growth: The New Shape of Publishing M&A
A defining pattern in media M&A, Whiteley says, is horizontal diversification. “Revenue diversification within publishing is happening through acquisition,” she explains. “It’s easier to buy than to develop a new division or a new activity that you don’t have.”
Think of a large traditional publisher acquiring an events company, or a content-driven business buying a data or analytics firm. These cross-disciplinary deals require expertise beyond what most publishers possess, which is where FT Strategies steps in providing commercial diligence and transaction support.
Many mid-sized publishers also come seeking help to prepare for sale. “We helped a few companies prepare for sale, make them more attractive for acquisition,” she says. In a consolidating market where scale matters and AI threaten niche players, getting your house in order before going to market has become essential.
Publishing is entering a phase where owning the full stack from data to distribution often determines survival. Companies able to show diversified revenue sources, from subscriptions to events and research services, attract far higher valuations. “It’s about resilience,” she says. “Buyers want to know that even if advertising drops or AI disrupts certain workflows, the company can still stand.”
Why Publishers Still Build When They Should Buy
Few debates in publishing are as fraught as whether to build technology in-house or buy it. Whiteley has strong views, shaped by decades watching telecoms and broadcasters wrestle with the same issue.
“There’s a strong tendency to build in-house in media,” she observes. “Telecoms and broadcast went through the same cycle building heavy internal tech, then moving to outsourcing.” Publishing, she argues, hasn’t yet learned that lesson.
“It’s not so tech-intensive, so people think, ‘We can do it ourselves.’ They think that means control. But when you need to move quickly, you just can’t.” In the age of AI, where innovation cycles are counted in weeks, that inertia is costly.”
She smiles wryly. “Building in-house does make it easier to guide product roadmaps around strategic priorities, but publishers need to prioritise investments on what makes them unique. “When the FT created its CMS, there were no good options in the market, but nobody opens a website and thinks, “Such a great CMS “, she says. “High-quality user experience is a must, but content, not code, is the differentiating factor.”
The right balance, she argues, is maintaining enough In-house expertise to judge vendors, manage risk and control critical functions. “You need to have the understanding to evaluate partners and assure quality” she says, “but you don’t always need to be the builder”
The FT Strategies Partner Network
That pragmatism has led to one of FT Strategies’ newest initiatives: a formal partner ecosystem of vetted technology vendors. “We work with hundreds of publishers every year,” says Whiteley, “and many ask, ‘Who should I use for this? Who can help me with that?’”
The network includes enterprise platforms and niche providers alike, selected through a rigorous vetting process based on proven performance with clients or internal FT experience. Demand is high: “We have a big backlog now of vendors to assess,” Whiteley notes.
For an industry often lacking discipline in technology procurement, the partner ecosystem offers rare trusted recommendations backed by cross-industry experience.
This isn’t just a matchmaking exercise. It’s part of a larger move toward what FT Strategies calls an “ecosystem approach” to transformation. Instead of seeing technology as a set of discrete purchases, publishers are encouraged to think in systems where CMS, CRM, analytics and AI tools work together to serve the business model.
Sam Gould, and Adriana Whiteley from at FT Strategies present at the Press Gazette, Future of Media Conference in London on 11th September 2025
Unlocking Micro-Communities Through Metadata
Another frontier for FT Strategies is helping publishers use AI to re-tag archives and uncover hidden audience niches. Traditional analytics focus on traffic and engagement; AI enables granular tagging that reveals patterns humans would miss.
“With AI, you can tag archives at scale and identify sub-zones of content,” says Whiteley. “It lets you understand which clusters of users engage most deeply.”
Instead of generic newsletters for “young readers in London,” AI can help identify micro-segments such as young cyclists in London and build communities and sponsorships around them. “You enable business models that didn’t exist before,” she says.
Publishers sitting on decades of content may be sitting on under-exploited gold. “Sometimes it’s hard to spot those trends manually,” she notes. “If you get two articles a month in a little sub-segment, but readers who engage with them stay longer, that’s a signal. Those are areas worth building around.”
She adds, “Once archives are properly tagged, it becomes feasible to resurface and monetise historical content, something that was previously uneconomic. You can create clusters of stories, newsletters, or even niche products that appeal to those micro-communities.”
The Human Slop Problem
Few topics make journalists defensive faster than questioning whether human writing is always superior to AI. Whiteley doesn’t flinch. “If you rely on what I call ‘human slop,’ you’re in trouble.”
She points to formulaic reporting, press-release rewrites, predictable recaps, that AI can easily replicate. The challenge isn’t that AI produces better prose; it’s that much of human output is barely distinctive.
“The solution is to capture unique voices,” she argues. “Opinion, humour, authority quality that’s noticeable.” This evolution will push journalists to develop individual brands, sometimes even on their own platforms. “Publications will have to capture that talent and make sure it stays within the system.”
From Digital-First to AI-First
By 2025, one might assume every newsroom is digital-first. Not so, says Whiteley. “Many still save the best stories for print. It’s a mindset issue.” That inertia reveals how far many publishers are from becoming AI-first.
“If we’re still convincing some that it’s not about paper anymore, imagine how far we are from AI-first,” she says. “There’s still a lag in adoption, a real innovation gap.”
This lag isn’t just about technology. It reflects organisational culture. The FT went through its digital-first transition two decades ago, she notes, but many others are still catching up. “The innovation curve is still behind where it needs to be.”
She advises starting with small steps. “You don’t have to automate everything at once. Test AI in tagging, personalisation, or audience analytics, then scale.”
The Google Dilemma
When asked about the changes with Google Adriana replied “In a future when questions will be answered by AI chatbots, publishers need to find new strategies. Some are creating AI-readable pages, promoting their own apps and pushing an increasing number of notifications. Many are also boosting advertising spend, or diversifying platforms.”
“Both Apple News and Google Discover have emerged as important alternative sources of referral and revenue in the last year,” says Whiteley, but “What we recommend to everyone is make sure your content and service is unique, and you have a direct relationship with readers”. “Publishers should focus more on meeting users’ needs and double down on first-party data”. “It comes back to the value proposition, “ she says.
AI: Under-Hyped, Not Over-Hyped
Contrary to industry hand-wringing, Whiteley believes AI is under-hyped. “We overestimate short-term effects, underestimate long-term ones,” she says. “Because people catch ChatGPT making a mistake, they think AI isn’t good. But those mistakes won’t won’t stop competitors and users from adopting it”
She likens it to the internet’s slow burn. “It took a decade from the web’s start to Google being launched and Netflix came almost a decade later. AI will follow a similar curve, except faster, because its economics are already compelling.”
Having worked through the fibre-optic buildout of the dot-com era, she’s attuned to how infrastructure shapes adoption. “With AI, the costs are already affordable to users. You don’t need a crash for the model to take off”.
Mission-Driven Consultancy
So why focus on helping mid-sized publishers survive? “We’re very mission-oriented,” says Whiteley. “We work hard on the sustainability of the industry.” Around 90% of FT Strategies’ work is with external clients, not the Financial Times itself proof it’s a genuine consulting practice, not a house lab.
Whiteley notes that outside a handful of global players such as Axel Springer and Schibsted, almost every publisher is mid-sized. “Even The Economist or The Guardian are mid-sized globally,” she points out. “They don’t have endless capital or R&D. They face the same constraints.”
The Nordics, she adds, show what’s possible when companies move decisively. “They’re so far ahead in AI strategy. Clear, bold, and it’s working.”
Publishers Must Do Now
Whiteley’s prescription is blunt:
Accept reality. “There’s a tendency to dismiss AI as hype. Denial isn’t strategy.”
Audit your revenues. Identify which streams AI can replace.
Elevate unique voices. Focus on talent and quality AI can’t mimic.
Own your audience. Build first-party data and direct relationships.
Build your roadmap strategically. Use internal and external resources as needed to ensure flexibility and ability to adapt quickly”
Explore niches. Use AI to find and monetise micro-communities.
She pauses before the conclusion. “This isn’t a moment to panic,” she says, “but it is a moment to act.”
The Hard Truth
The industry’s mid-tier is at risk. Many publishers are still fighting yesterday’s digital battles while tomorrow’s AI disruption accelerates. FT Strategies’ work often amounts to triage helping those that can adapt move faster, and identifying those too exposed to save.
For publishers reading this, Whiteley’s warning is unmistakable: the era of AI experimentation is over. The time for bold choices is now because waiting to see what the Financial Times does next means you’re already behind.
Publishing has always been slow to change. This time, it may not have the luxury.
