Newsrewired 2026: Six Sessions, One Recurring Question
AI, video and the post-search problem: dispatches from Newsrewired, the biannual journalism conference in London.
The Insider, The Economist’s twice-weekly video show, took six months and 40 pilot episodes to build. It put named journalists on camera for the first time in more than a century, reached 90% brand awareness across the subscriber base within months of launch, and is, by the publication’s own admission, only one half of the answer to a harder question: how to acquire new readers in an environment where Google is sending fewer of them.
That was the question circling Newsrewired 2026, the biannual journalism conference in London. No theme was declared, but one emerged anyway. Google search is declining as a referral source, social platforms are less reliable than they were five years ago, and AI is absorbing queries that used to produce clicks. The discovery mechanisms publishers spent the last decade building around are quietly eroding, and not everyone has a plan for what comes next.
Across six sessions, three rough postures emerged. Build new products inside the legacy structure (The Economist’s Luke Bradley-Jones, The Times’s Tom Calver). Go where the audiences already are, on the platforms’ terms (Reddit’s Oliver Wrighton and Rachel Duffy from The Times). Or build something small enough to own outright, audience and all (Jim Waterson, Daniel Ionescu, Flight Story’s Grace Miller). The Reuters Institute’s Nic Newman, presenting research on news podcasting, sat across all three.
The Economist breaks its 100-year anonymity.
Luke Bradley-Jones, President of The Economist Group, opened by describing a product that would have been unthinkable for most of the publication’s history. The Insider is a twice-weekly video show in which Economist journalists appear on screen, debate, and make visible the internal mechanics behind the publication’s collective view of the world.
For more than a century, The Economist ran no bylines. Anonymity was part of the brand. The Insider inverts that. “What consumers wanted,” said Bradley-Jones, “was to get closer to our journalists, to see behind the curtain of the Economist, the workflows and how we really debated the discussions that happen inside.”
The product took six months to develop before launch. The team produced around 40 pilots, each reviewed by about 20 people in the newsroom each week. Of a staff of 300, around 10 to 15 journalists appear each week. Shows run at 45 minutes. Completion rates are 30 to 40%, high for that length. The show built quickly across the subscriber base, reaching over 90% brand awareness within months of launch.
The Insider is primarily a retention play, designed to deepen relationships with existing subscribers in a market where acquiring a new one costs significantly more than keeping an old one. But retention is only one side of the problem, and acquisition is the harder, more urgent one. As Google search declines and AI products absorb more of the discovery journey, the routes to new readers narrow.
The response is a new streaming product, video and audio only, being tested in Canada this summer before a potential global rollout. The format is a daily menu: a 5- to 10-minute morning briefing, a 20-minute analysis segment, The Insider’s deeper dives, and games. Pricing will sit well below the core subscription, with a free tier for pre-subscribers in development. Bradley-Jones cited the New York Times as the model: build habitual engagement first, then ask for the conversion.
When it comes to AI adoption, The Economist is moving faster than most. Two board members with deep AI backgrounds, one from Google DeepMind and the other Amazon’s former international head, have set the pace. Journalists are using code to automate research workflows, pull data from Snowflake, and generate charts. Agentic AI has taken over increasingly large chunks of product development. A CarPlay app that had sat on the roadmap for years was shipped in five weeks.
Asked what keeps him awake, Bradley-Jones said: “How we continue to acquire customers in an environment where good-enough AI products are increasingly mounting up.”
Kill the guesswork
Grace Miller, Head of Failure and Experimentation at FlightStory, the media agency behind a YouTube channel that has grown from 100,000 to 16 million subscribers, gave a session on experimentation culture.
Most teams, in her view, make decisions on instinct; FlightStory does not. “Anytime someone says vibes, it makes me cringe,” she said. Before any campaign goes live, the agency runs structured tests on content, thumbnails and trailers: what Miller calls killing the guesswork.
The arithmetic is harsh: seven in ten experiments are inconclusive; of the remaining three, two fail and one succeeds. FlightStory’s trailer team spent over a year in inconclusive testing before results began to come in. The argument for continuing was simple: the failures were teaching them faster than any optimised repetition would.
For larger organisations where public experimentation carries brand risk, the practical routes are platform tools that don’t permanently surface test content, synthetic AI audiences for pre-live testing, and incremental budget asks of 10 to 20% to test an idea rather than committing in full. The pitch to sceptical stakeholders is not a bet but a structured question with a planned answer, whatever that answer turns out to be.
Reddit: the slow burn
Reddit now has 125 billion monthly views and 490 million weekly active users, according to the company’s most recent figures. For publishers, it has an unusual property: a substantial share of its users are not active on other major platforms. That is material unduplicated reach.
Oliver Wrighton, who works with publishers and brands on organic Reddit strategy, and Rachel Duffy, who is Head of Community at The Times, gave a joint session on what works. The answer was patience. Reddit is community-led, moderated by volunteers who take the character of their subreddits seriously. Publishers who arrive treating it as a distribution channel tend to get rejected and quit. Those that build moderator relationships first, and establish editorial authority rather than traffic intent, eventually see the return.
“Publishers have given up because it kind of feels like you’re getting nowhere,” said Duffy. “But it’s short-term pain, long-term gain. When you reach out not even with the intent of sharing content, just to introduce yourself, you’re able to go back to those relationships when you do have something really valuable.”
The Telegraph’s Ukraine coverage demonstrated the approach. Frontline journalism gave the publication something to offer communities as a credible authority rather than a traffic-seeker. Around the 2024 US election.
Reddit Pro, launched this year and free for publishers, provides link tracking, RSS feed sync and community recommendations. Wrighton’s caveat about RSS was clear: bulk posting is a fast route to spam flags. The tool is for discovery, not automation.
Times Data: Is Britain getting better or worse?
Tom Calver, data editor of The Times and Sunday Times, presented Times Data, a live dashboard of 40 indicators tracking whether Britain is getting better or worse, updated daily. The session was not, in fairness, about audience reach; it was about how to do data journalism well in 2026. But the underlying logic touches the same nerve: a habitual, fixed-location product designed to bring readers back without depending on platforms to deliver them.
The ambition was breadth combined with ruthless simplicity. Heavy economic indicators sit alongside the price of a pint, restaurant meals and government approval ratings. Each gets a single line chart and a directional signal, designed to be interpreted in seconds. Every card carries a source note with reproducible methodology, and the page updates regardless of whether the news is good for the government.
Colour-coding proved more politically fraught than expected. Inflation: red. GDP growth: green. House prices? The answer depends on whether you own one. Small boat crossings were harder still. A third grey category was introduced for a handful of measures where a binary verdict would itself have been a political act.
Calver used Claude to brainstorm indicators and locate obscure data sources (it was particularly useful for finding hidden data on the Bank of England website) but wrote the aggregation scripts himself. “The moment it needed to carry the Times name, I needed to trust it, and for me, AI wasn’t there yet.” Scripts run but require a human to push to the GitHub repo before publication, preserving an editorial check.
The dashboard now sits as a rotating data strip at the top of The Times UK homepage. Next steps include an API feed and CMS integration, so journalists can drop live charts into articles with a single command.
Video podcasting: a dual-format medium
Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute presented findings from the Institute’s third major report on news podcasting. Video is not replacing audio so much as expanding the medium to new audiences and contexts, and the production and commissioning decisions that follow are significant.
In the US, most podcast users now consume both audio and video formats each week, twice as many as consume audio only. YouTube dominates as a discovery platform. Spotify has been pushing producers towards video conversion. Apple joined a few weeks before the conference, enabling seamless toggling between audio and video within the interface.
The growth is concentrated in conversational formats: personality-led shows that are cheaper to make and feed algorithmic demand for content. Daily news podcasts remain largely audio and brand-led. Documentary series, expensive to produce, are being squeezed. Publishers are converting their chat formats to video first and leaving the others untouched.
The pull is as commercial as it is editorial. Video opens discovery and deepens the parasocial relationship between audience and host. Online video advertising is substantially larger than audio, and successful podcast studios are now licensing content to television; Goalhanger’s Gary Lineker has a deal with Netflix. According to reporting in The Times his company will earn over £14million for The Rest is Football daily show during the World Cup.
Publishers that treat podcasting as a funnel add-on are structurally disadvantaged relative to models like Goalhanger, which has built around talent, community and fandom, with multimodal outputs (audio, video, newsletters and live events) and multiple revenue streams. The Guardian and the New York Times are both moving towards studio-based models. The add-on approach is becoming harder to sustain.
The indie argument
Jim Waterson, founder of London Centric and former media editor of the Guardian, opened with a project he ran in 2019 and repeated in 2024: recording users’ screens during a general election campaign to see what they consumed. The 2019 data was mainstream-heavy. He called the 2024 data “terrifying”: almost entirely creators, influencers and short-form video, with mainstream sources barely registering.
That prompted him to leave and build London Centric, a London-focused, investigation-led operation with around 40,000 free subscribers and 5,000 paying subscribers. It is profitable, and deliberately AI-free. “The thing that really works is when there’s a human delivering original stuff people can’t get elsewhere. The stuff that flops is when it’s stories or content you could already be getting somewhere.”
Daniel Ionescu, founder of the Millennial Masters podcast and newsletter, started from a different place. His first media venture was local news in Lincoln, a city of 100,000 people where, he argued, sustainable independent journalism is essentially impossible regardless of operational efficiency. Millennial Masters is lean and geographically unbound. Content is split into three types: audience-acquisition pieces, personal-interest pieces, and long-form podcast episodes. Conversion to paying subscribers tends to happen between the second and third type.
Unlike Waterson, Ionescu has AI built into his production stack from day one: ChatGPT for editing notes, Canva AI for production. On equipment, his advice was direct: half the best podcasts in the world are recorded on an iPhone, and a mid priced microphone can do the same job as a £200 one.
The recurring question
The day kept circling one question that none of the speakers quite stated outright: how do you build a direct relationship with an audience when the platforms that used to do it for you are increasingly unreliable? The answers on offer differed in scale but not in substance. The Economist is engineering one at the level of a global subscription business, with streaming products, video shows and an AI-accelerated product team. Waterson is building one on his own, with 5,000 paying subscribers and a deliberate refusal to use any of it. What none of them are doing is waiting for the old discovery routes to come back.