Creator journalism is the most disruptive shift the news industry has seen, ex-BBC News head says

If broadcasters want to rebuild trust and remain relevant, they must “liberate their talent” and let their journalists act more like independent creators, Deborah Turness said in a speech in London this week.

“I believe the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms,” Turness, the former CEO of BBC News, said. “It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism in a more fragmented media universe.”

Turness and BBC director-general Tim Davie resigned from their roles last November following reports that a BBC Panorama documentary about January 6 edited a speech by Donald Trump in a misleading way. (“The edit wasn’t up to editorial standards,” Turness said at Semafor’s Restoring Trust in Media summit in February, “but I don’t accept the charge that it was a sign of institutional bias.”)

In recent months, Turness said, she’s been “on a journey to piece together the new map of our media ecosystem, to gain a deeper understanding of what’s really going on beneath its surface.”

“I believe the impact of this revolution on established news providers may be greater than the advent of the digital age or the arrival of social media,” she continued, “because they were, in truth, about new platforms, new spaces where high-quality, trusted journalism could still find its place — essentially, same journalism, different location. This moment of disruption is so potent because it goes to the heart of how the relationship between news provider and news consumer is shifting.”

Turness’s speech, the 2026 Sir David Nicholas Memorial Lecture, was organized by the ITN 1955 Club in partnership with The Media Society and the Broadcasting Journalism Training Council. Here’s the main text of the speech. I left out the introduction where Turness talks about her connection to U.K. production company ITN, where she was CEO from 2021–2022. I also added some links and subheds and highlighted some key points to make it easier to read the text. You can watch the full lecture here.)

“You might have expected me to use this lecture to talk about my departure from the BBC, to focus on the unique challenges facing the new director-general — and I do want to wish Matt Brittin well next week — or to talk about how the new charter should strengthen the BBC governance to protect its independence.

As you would expect, I do have views on all of this and more, because I love the BBC and I care deeply about its future. It is a brilliant organization made up of amazing people. At BBC News, I had the privilege to lead a talented organization of over 5,000, delivering powerful journalism to half a billion people around the world in over 40 languages. I can see some of my former colleagues in the room this evening, and I remain so grateful for their dedication.

But tonight my focus is going to be broader than the BBC, because disruption being faced by our industry transcends all news brands. It impacts all journalists and all journalism everywhere.

I don’t plan on painting a relentlessly negative picture this evening. Those who know me well would not expect me to deliver a “game over” or a “we’re all going to hell in a handcart” kind of speech. I am an optimist, a cup-half-full person. I believe there are very good reasons to have faith in a bright future for what I call the established news providers, a term I prefer to “old” or “legacy” media with the implication that they belong somehow in the past or cannot succeed in the future. For decades, these organizations have delivered outstanding, brave, impartial, urgent journalism vital to our society. They are needed now more than ever.

So while I will be diagnosing the challenge tonight, I’m also determined to set out a positive way forward. I’m not coming to you tonight as someone, though, who has discovered all the answers. Quite the opposite. Working in the news media all my career, I’ve had the privilege of a front-row seat to the rapid pace of change over so many years, both witnessing and driving it in the U.S. as president of NBC News, the nation’s largest news provider; launching NBC News International as a global business and overseeing the global brand Euronews after its acquisition in the UK; as CEO of ITN, the U.K.’s largest PSB [public service broadcaster] production house, and then most recently, as CEO of BBC News, leading the U.K.’s biggest newsroom, while supporting its global revenue business. All to say, not to boast, that leading organizations, reshaping brands, launching new revenue models, is what I’ve been doing, publicly funded and commercial, local and global, and it’s perhaps given me a unique breadth of experience.

These past few months, I’ve had a chance to look from the outside in, rather than the inside out. I’ve used my time since leaving the BBC to go on a journey, to piece together the new map of our media ecosystem, to gain a deeper understanding of what’s really going on beneath its surface, where investment in the industry is going, what’s driving growth, how consumer behavior is changing.

I’ve spoken to people right across the industry, here at home and in the U.S, because as we know, the tidal wave of disruption that hits us here often begins across the Atlantic. I’ve explored how podcasts and subscription journalism are creating new revenue models.

I’ve spoken with those launching new platforms and building new startups, and to the private equity investors placing bets on their growth.

With independent journalists who left big networks to build their own entrepreneurial brands, helping establish a new journalist creator economy, and to those who are on the precipice of untethering from their media motherships, excited to join the party.

I’ve listened to the talent agents who are building out their clients’ brands, and I’ve compared notes with social scientists and the audience data experts tracking this rapidly changing media landscape.

These conversations have been fascinating and enlightening. Having the time to talk with brilliant people and explore ideas without the pressure of running a giant news corporation has been a complete joy. So when Nigel Dacre invited me to speak to you, it felt only natural to use this opportunity to share a progress report of everything I’ve learned so far. It’s why I’ve titled my lecture tonight “The Revolution Reshaping News: A Dispatch from the Front Line.”

“The wholesale shift from one information ecosystem to another”

I believe the impact of this revolution on established news providers may be greater than the advent of the digital age or the arrival of social media, because they were in truth about new platforms, new spaces where high-quality, trusted journalism could still find its place. Essentially, same journalism, different location. This moment of disruption is so potent because it goes to the heart of how the relationship between news provider and news consumer is shifting from institutions to individuals, from big media brands to personalities, from PSBs to independent journalists, all with dramatic consequences for where news consumption is collapsing, and where it’s growing at speed.

We’re all familiar with the decline in TV news audiences, with nearly 4 million fewer people getting their news from TV in the last five years, and that includes streaming. Maybe that decline would be less steep if PSBs and others had an obligation to give news on their streaming platforms more priority and to optimize it. I think that finding news on rail 9 or 11 or 13 of a streaming player is just not good enough. At the same time, we’ve seen a trebling of the number getting their news from YouTube and a 10-fold increase on TikTok.

I believe the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism in a more fragmented media universe. We’ve seen an explosion of independent journalism and commentators hosting podcasts, creating their own YouTube channels, and publishing articles on Substack, where they can monetize their work directly, from Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, to Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, and Lewis Goodall’s The News Agents podcast. From the hugely successful The Rest Is… brand to Jim Waterson’s fast-growing London Centric on Substack, and in the U.S., from Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell, which I highly recommend, to news brands like Puck or The Ankler.

This creator journalism is not a side show. It is fast becoming the show. Just look at the audiences the biggest independent journalists in the U.S have built on YouTube alone. Joe Rogan, more than 20 million subscribers. Tucker Carlson, 6 million. Megyn Kelly, more than 4 million. Mehdi Hasan, nearly 2 million and growing.

If we’ve been wondering for years what would eventually replace the broadcast news mass media model, I think we’re seeing the answer now. These new forms of journalism are taking the time, the loyalty, and the trust that consumers used to invest in big, mainstream news providers, and they’re moving it to new platforms.

To understand what’s driving this, I spoke to Piers Morgan, who has built a YouTube audience of more than 4 million with Uncensored and is now expanding the brand with History Uncensored and The Royals Uncensored, which launched a couple of weeks ago. He told me that particularly young people are incredibly informed about what’s happening in the world thanks to constant social media updates, but what they really want to know is what they should think about the stories in the news. He claims his viewers perceive him to be authentic and intellectually honest. It’s clear this is not just another technology-enabled stage in a story of media progress. What we’re witnessing is the wholesale shift from one information ecosystem to another, and if we’re honest, one where established news providers have, so far, struggled to authentically play at scale.

I would argue this is because this revolution is a rejection of and a reaction against the very broad reach model that the established media is built on. In many ways, it is the antithesis of everything that news media has traditionally stood for. What do I mean by this? Success in the new world is driven by a recognition that consumer trust is now earned through authenticity, through independence, and through opinion. Authentic, with the informality and unpredictability of real conversations. Independent, with the freedom for the presenter to speak their mind. Opinionated, without the need to constantly tread carefully around issues. All creating the sense of a one-to-one experience, a feeling of intimacy and a greater connection, versus the polished, controlled formality that is in the DNA of the established media. And, yes, the impartiality. This is the uncomfortable truth that has been crystallized to me through my conversations over the past few months.

That’s not to say there isn’t brilliant, bold, and fantastic creative work going on across the industry to respond to these new consumer demands. I enjoyed watching Cathy Newman’s innovative new evening program on Sky News last week, which is seeking to crack this exact challenge. CNN has showed a willingness to experiment in this space, too, and found out just how difficult it is. Lead anchor Jake Tapper abandoned his CNN studio to anchor part of his program from his personal office with the backdrop of political memorabilia and large vintage podcast-style mics, an attempt to mimic the more informal YouTube style. It had, at the very best, mixed reviews.

This new authenticity is hard, because authenticity has to be authentic, and consumers quickly see through any attempt that feels manufactured or fake. A glance at the Apple or Spotify top 10 podcasts or YouTube’s most popular channels shows us that this space is dominated by independent media, and traditional media have just not yet been able to fully crack the code and break their way in. These new forms of content are driving growth in audiences and in revenues. This is a new gold rush, with private equity investors eager to fund the next big talent and turn their brand into an empire.

The value of the global podcast market alone is projected to grow from $32 billion last year to $114 billion by 2030. $32 billion to $114 billion just by 2030. In this fragmented universe, news and information content across YouTube, podcasts, Substack, newsletters, social media, and more are far bigger in aggregate than any broadcast reach can deliver.

I’ve been talking to the founder of Substack, Hamish McKenzie, who is writing a new book called How to Save the Media. He argues that the disruption of established media has happened in three phases.

First, there were the big media institutions that were the juggernauts of the news industry; if you like, the gatekeepers of the channels through which the content flowed, and they controlled the editorial and the advertising revenues.

Then came phase two, the social media platforms, where creators have editorial freedom over their content, but Big Tech are now the gatekeepers of distribution and advertising.

But now, Hamish argues, we’re in the third phase, where Substack and podcasts are a gatekeeper-free world, where creators have ownership of their editorial, of their distribution, and a share of the revenue. A world where individual journalists are paid by individual consumers for their work and can build a viable business of their own. The U.K. is Substack’s second largest and fastest-growing market after the U.S., with over half a million people now paying subscriptions direct to writers for their work, and it has spawned a raft of competitive platforms, such as Beehiiv, now providing alternative places to grow a direct consumer base.

This new phase of one-to-one direct relationships is becoming well and truly mainstream, accelerating the downward spiral of the one-to-many broadcast model. This point was made starkly by U.S. media journalist Dylan Byers in a discussion on his Puck podcast. He said that “the long inexorable decline of linear television, particularly television news, that I have been talking about ad nauseam for years, really feels like it’s arrived now.” His guest, a former NBC colleague of mine, Noah Oppenheim, agreed, saying, “The era of broad reach is over. We now inhabit a fractured landscape, where trying to aggregate millions of viewers is not just a fool’s errand, but not worth a ton of time and effort.”

Noah has a point. Days like today tell us when there’s a huge news story, people are still gathering on broadcast platforms. But the overall trajectory is doubtless going down. And it has been for some time.

“We have lost Sarah”

The move away from mass reach and its replacement with a fragmented media landscape is what defines this revolution I’m talking about. It is a long-term, irreversible shift more profound than we have so far understood, and it’s completely reshaping our industry.

This was brought home to me recently when I spoke to Sarah, the nurse who treated me when I found myself in A&E after my hand became embroiled in a fight between a cat and a dog. Sarah asked me about my line of work, and it triggered a fascinating conversation. It turns out she’s a total news junkie, obsessed with politics here and in the U.S. Despite juggling long shifts at the hospital and a five-year-old, she never misses an episode of The Rest Is Politics or The News Agents. She listens to Pod Save America and The Rachel Maddow Show. She’s just downloaded Substack.

Not once did she mention a traditional news provider, despite growing up on a typical diet of BBC and ITV content. I asked her why, and her answer was very simple: I trust them. I feel like I know them. I feel like they’re not led into one way of thinking. They have edge.

Sarah is exactly the kind of person all news organizations want to reach — engaged, curious, committed, but making very different media choices, trusting in a new and very different way. We have lost Sarah.

And the reason why this matters transcends the impact on any one organization. It matters because this new media diet is, in the main, driven by commentary and conversation. And because the established media has not yet broken into this new world at scale, it isn’t yet the home of frontline reporting by courageous journalists from dark and dangerous places across the globe, or, with notable exceptions, the home of risky undercover investigations that expose wrongdoing and uncover lies.

I was listening to media podcast The Grill Room last week, where they were asking, “Are creators the new Cronkites?” I believe the answer is very clearly “not yet,” but if the established media want to continue to be the ones to carry forward that legacy, then they must find a way to succeed at scale in this new world. Otherwise, how will consumers access vital journalism in the future? And just as importantly, how will it be funded? Because the advertising revenues are following the consumers onto these new platforms, and it’s those revenues that fund expensive journalism, reporting live from downtown Tehran or the front lines of Ukraine, standing up as the powerful, exposing corruption and taking on vested interests.

It’s not only our duty to follow the consumer, but our necessity to follow the money, because journalism costs, and even if you’re funded by a license fee, the journalism is funded by people being willing to pay it, essentially a subscription model. In a world of dictators and autocrats, state-run propaganda, disinformation, and AI slop, the need for this eyewitness journalism funded and delivered by the established news media is more critical now than ever. Reporters Without Borders revealed last month that for the first time in the 25-year history of the World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s population lacks access to free, fair, and fact-based journalism.

So the challenge is clear: Will we wake up to the existential nature of this great shift in our industry? Will we respond with the speed, urgency, and purpose required? Or will we be like the proverbial frog in boiling water, who knew it was getting warm, but failed to jump in time?

As Rosa Luxemburg famously said, “Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it’s seen as having been inevitable.” And this revolution has been coming for a long time, but it’s not too late. I did promise I was going to be an optimist, and I believe there is still time to join it. I believe the established news media has everything it needs to succeed, the assets required to win in this new world.

First, the talented, experienced journalists who have spent a lifetime carving out a reputation and the consumers who crave connection with them; brands that have meaning for audiences; and a legacy of trust. The irony is lost on no one that many of the biggest names leading this revolution built their profiles inside established media players.

However, my optimism here is conditional on whether the established media is willing to deploy those assets to win and not be left behind. So tonight, I want to share some conclusions that I’ve reached having listened to those on the front lines of this revolution.

“On every metric…the long-term trend was down”

As I see it, there are three clear priorities. Restore trust; understand what drove the decline and how it can be reversed. Reconnect, through authenticity; come to terms with what it will really take to give consumers the authentic, independent voices they crave. Reinvent the newsroom; create an engine that delivers across this fragmented landscape.

Let me take each of these in turn. First, restoring trust. I believe that to understand why audiences are moving from institutions to individuals, we have to understand the long-term decline in trust in those institutions, a shift accelerated by global events, societal change, and new technologies.

Social scientist Alfie Spencer argues that the rupture in trust goes back to the 2008 financial crash, when banks were bailed out but so many ordinary people lost their hard-earned homes and livelihoods and suffered for years. The system failed them, and they felt they’d been lied to. This sense of injustice and powerlessness, of feeling betrayed, impacted in trusting governments, banks, and, yes, the media, too.

Over the following decade, this dissatisfaction with the traditional political and social order translated into the rise of populist movements. It was fueled by the growing sense that the system no longer works for them, that the routes to get ahead are closed off, that their children are no longer guaranteed a better quality of life than the previous generation, that others are being put ahead of them — exacerbating an us and them mood in society. We saw some of the consequences of that in the rejection of established political parties at last week’s U.K. elections. They continue to play out in the political drama we’re all witnessing today and tonight.

Meanwhile, social media platforms connected like-minded people and became the home of the growing disinformation industry. Troll armies and clickbait factories flooded the social media landscape with viral lies that fed on the outrage. Add to this highly polarizing events: Brexit, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and then the 2020 Covid pandemic, all whipping up a perfect storm where dissatisfaction and disinformation could thrive together.

As a result, we saw a loss of trust in experts. The idea of agreed facts started to be undone. The concept of truth became replaced by your truth and my truth, all weakening critical parts of our social scaffolding. Trust in news was a casualty, falling, according to [the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism], from 51% in 2015 to just 35% last year, a 16-point decline.

This downward trajectory was the reality when I walked in to BBC News late in 2022. The BBC was then and remains today the world’s most trusted news provider, but on every metric, in common with many other institutions and news organizations, the long-term trend was down. In brand terms, trust is the BBC’s USP, its unique selling point, in the U.K. and around the world. As a CEO, I was therefore clear that my number-one priority must be to build a plan to reduce that decline in trust.

And we did. Working with some brilliant colleagues, some of whom are in this room tonight, the changes we made helped to turn the tide of decline. Through radical interventions, we saw trust begin to grow again, even during the last U.K. and U.S. election cycles, when it usually takes a massive hit, with public views of the trustworthiness of BBC News increasing from 57% to 62% in the year 24-25.

So what did we do? We started, as I’ve again been doing now, by listening to audiences, to ask consumers across the U.K. and around the globe one question: What would it take to grow your trust in BBC News? The answer came back in many languages, but a consistent message: Five requirements, which became a mission statement for BBC News.

They told us to “Earn our trust.” We need clarity in the chaos, giving them the facts that they need to make decisions about their own lives. We need courage, reporting from difficult and dangerous places and to uncover wrongdoing. Fairness and respect. Fairness is in reflecting the true breadth of the broadening political spectrum. Respect, recognizing that license fee payers are stakeholders and should be given a voice and a say in the BBC’s journalism.

And finally, transparency. Show us your workings, pull back the curtain on your journalism and how you check the facts so that we know why we can trust you. And that’s how BBC Verify was born. It was a new, industry-leading forensic journalism and fact-checking service, which quickly became the leading global verification brand, with Ofcom research finding it had fast become the most-used fact-checking tool in the U.K. And crucially, because we tracked this closely, it proved to be the most effective of all our initiatives in growing trust with the audience. A year after its launch, surveys showed that those who had consumed Verify content said they were more likely to trust the BBC as a result.

It’s all about earning trust, and “Trust is earned” was the title of the BBC News mission statement and became the organization’s tagline. The humility in reprising that statement was intentional and relevant to this conversation about this revolution. It was saying, please don’t think that we are a big institution that’s here to tell you what you need. We work for you, and we are listening, and we are striving to earn your trust. It was a cultural shift, and in my view, an overdue repositioning of the brand and the relationship between those who pay and those who serve. They asked for clarity, for courage, for fairness, respect, and transparency. But today, four years on, once again, listening to consumers, there is a new priority that I would argue we urgently need to add: Authenticity.

“News providers are going to have to be more prepared to liberate their talent”

And this is my second priority, to urgently reconnect through authenticity. The dictionary tells us that authenticity is the quality of being genuine, real, or true to oneself, rather than a copy or an imitation, and it is this sense of being themselves that is drawing consumers towards independent journalists and personalities and away from established media brands. And yet a news organization’s human capital has always been its greatest asset and helped to define its brand. The audiences, presenters, and correspondents are the DNA of the organization, but now, that human capital, in the new world, must be deployed in a very different way.

News providers will need to accept that in future, the connection with their consumers must flow through a more direct relationship with their talent and one that feels less controlled, less formal, less corporate, human to human. What might this mean in practice? Well, it might mean going to a news organization’s website and instead of finding content organized only around topics, being able to follow individual correspondence and specialists.

Let me explain further. Imagine, as a Channel 4 News consumer, if you could follow your most trusted journalists, just as you’d expect to do on a social platform. You might choose to follow Lindsey Hilsum or Matt Frei, Victoria Macdonald or Alex Thomson. And let’s take the excellent Victoria Macdonald, Channel 4’s health and social care editor, as an example. In this world, you would access a live feed of her health articles and analysis, receive an authored daily newsletter, personalized news alerts on health stories as they break throughout the day with links to Victoria’s take on those stories; a take, her expert analysis on what she thinks of them. You’d interact with her in online Q&As and be invited to in-person events. You would be able to build a connected relationship between you, the consumer, and Victoria, the correspondent. Imagine this today, as consumers seek credible information in the hantavirus outbreak with disinformation raging online. This deeper human connection with Victoria would pay dividends in the form of trust.

For too long, we, the established media, have limited the potential of our talent to build these kinds of direct relationships and undervalued the potential for what I would call the “connected correspondent” to express their professional perspectives in a way that really relates.

But we all have to accept those connections will not only be made on our own platforms. Journalists will want to build those relationships in spaces where people are increasingly getting their news, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Substack, and TikTok.

News organizations may worry all this is a challenge to the primacy of their own brand, and believe me, I get it. But my recent conversations have only strengthened my view that news providers are going to have to be more prepared to liberate their talent; to strike a new deal, if you like, with a compelling offer that outweighs the value of going it alone in the new talent economy.

This new deal could see news organizations providing capabilities, technology and support to enable their talent to be present in their own rights on the platforms and in the formats where growth now lies, while the talent agree to sign up to a set of values and principles, to impartiality, to the lines cannot be crossed, because I believe that it is possible to strike a different balance that retains the principle of impartiality but doesn’t let it get in the way of an authentic human conversation or written article.

I could see news organizations promote online routes to other platforms where consumers can discover more from the talent they trust. It might mean forging new business partnerships with their talent, with shared incentives and revenues. There isn’t a one-size-fits all template fit for this new deal, but without a willingness to embrace this kind of thinking, the draw will be too great and the opportunity too attractive, and the best will simply leave.

Now, if some of this sounds far-fetched, this is a reality right now in the U.S. news market. I recently spoke to Olivia Metzger, one of the most successful news talent managers in New York, who I worked closely with when I ran NBC News. Olivia told me that she used to spend — and we’re talking two or three years ago — most of her time negotiating exclusive multi-year deals for her clients to lock them in with big networks. Now, she spends the majority of her time trying to extract her clients from those same deals, offering maybe 20% of their time to the networks, while she helps them to monetize their IP and grow their brand with the rest of their time.

I’ve been speaking to some of those who’ve made the leap away from the established media. I’ve mentioned Piers Morgan. He told me, “Many more mainstream journalists could, and I know actively want to, do the same, if only their timid bosses let them off the leash and were more adventurous in the way they utilize their talent. If they don’t, then the inexorable migration” — there’s that word, again, inexorable — “of younger viewers and listeners away from mainstream media to YouTube channels like mine will continue at speed.”

I’ve also spoken to former CNN presenter Don Lemon, who has used that freedom to develop a groundbreaking new form of journalism on YouTube, pursuing a story as it develops, sometimes live-streaming for hours at a time, most famously leading to his arrest while covering an ICE protest at a Minnesota church back in January.

It’s enabled him to build his brand, what he calls the Lemon Nation, and a community of followers, his Lemonheads, who read his daily Lemon Drop newsletter. He claims he can now offer news “without corporate overlords” to his new direct consumers.

Closer to home, I caught up with Amol Rajan, who has walked away, or is about to, from Radio 4’s Today program to embrace this new world as an independent creator and entrepreneur, while remaining the host of University Challenge. He was buzzing with startup energy and ambition for how he can deploy his unique brand of accessible, intelligent journalism in this new world. We’ll all discover in the autumn whether Amol really is a traitor or a faithful when he heads to the castle with Claudia and the other celebrities.

Piers, Don, Amol. They’ve hey’ve all reached the conclusion that to pursue growth in a world where authenticity is prized and rewarded, they must step away from established media players. And no doubt others will follow. So the challenge is, are we willing to make the new deal with our talent that is more appealing than to go it alone?

“Surviving this revolution that’s reshaping news will require nothing short of the reinvention of the newsroom”

And this takes me to my third priority, which is that surviving this revolution that’s reshaping news will require nothing short of the reinvention of the newsroom. Now, I know how hard news organizations are reforming and reinvesting. Believe me, I do. I know how tough it is to drive transformation and change in a 24/7 business during a relentless news agenda. In my time leading BBC News, I was fortunate to work with some outstanding leaders who understood the consumer challenge and delivered the change. Together we launched a live streaming operation. We reinvented digital products, integrated vertical video and live social media–style news formats. In fact, our live page covering the murder of Charlie Kirk saw over 63 million pageviews globally, with so many younger consumers. We invested in InDepth, a talent-led longread form of journalism on the BBC platform, and newsletters. We launched podcasts and visualized them; discovered new audiences on YouTube; and we aggressively grew a TikTok following with a 62% year on year growth to now reach 2 billion monthly views. We reached new audiences in new ways with new formats. We felt we were creating a truly digital-first offer.

But the brutal truth is, even with all this innovation, most large news organizations remain structured around the needs of broadcast, with key decisions being made with a broadcast-first approach, and the machine geared to the broadcast output. Yet I would argue that if the established media are to thrive in this revolution, then they need to start from where the consumer is, allocating people and resources on that basis, starting again to build a truly digital and social production studio that enables them to produce and distribute content in the formats and on the platforms that consumers want, a greenfield, or a startup approach, if you like. This studio must be capable of delivering a flywheel of content, from visualized podcasts to short clips, from newsletters to live streams, analysis articles to long reads, longform documentaries to live events, all supporting the talent-centered model that I described earlier. The output from this digital studio would become the building blocks of the broadcast offer, turning today’s newsroom model upside down. This flywheel newsroom, as I call it, is what a genuinely digital-first model looks like. It provides the broadcast, but it’s designed for the future.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying we should be killing off the concept of the evening news bulletin. I’m saying we should make it differently. It’s no coincidence that, arguably, the world’s most successful news media story of recent times is rooted in a moment of total reinvention. Yes, I’m talking about The New York Times, which under the leadership of Mark Thompson decided to radically reinvent itself back in 2013. I was around the corner at NBC News and watched it all happening. Relentlessly investing in products, data and technology; launching the trailblazing The Daily podcast and a suite of newsletters; acquiring The Athletic to bolster sports coverage and Wordle as the core of a new daily challenges offer. By taking a ruthlessly digital-first approach, they transformed the Gray Lady, the epitome of old-school print media with a declining distribution model, into a data-driven media powerhouse, now with over 13 million overall subscribers, driven by a 16% year-on-year increase in subs. The reinvention of The New York Times is evidence that even in the most established of news media, it is never too late and you’re never too old to change.

So, I’m almost ready to file my dispatch from the front lines of this new revolution, having shared what I’ve learnt, from consumers to creators, from investors to innovators. I’ve said nearly everything I want to say tonight, but before I sign off, let me leave you with one further, perhaps provocative. thought: The lure of opinion and the amount of energy now generated by opinion-led journalism in all these spaces.

“The extent to which freedom of speech should become a companion to impartiality”

Debate and opinion have always been a critical part of the established news media’s broadcast offer, from LBC to Five Live, from Question Time to election debates and local radio phone-ins. Yet replicating this in the digital world has somehow proved so much harder. Instead, opinion today is the preserve of online spaces that have increasingly become echo chambers that keep people in their own tribes, reinforcing polarization, driven by algorithms that give you more of what you already think and what you already like, designed to incentivize division rather than promote understanding.

I believe established media operations have an opportunity to become the new town square, creating digital spaces where people are exposed to ideas different to their own, spaces that are thought-provoking and even provocative, that offer a kaleidoscope of thinking mirroring the diversity of opinion across the country.

I’m not arguing that correspondents working for organizations with a duty of impartiality should be giving their own opinions, or a free-for-all, with anyone able to self-publish on trusted news platforms and comment. What I’m asking is the extent to which freedom of speech should become a companion to impartiality. Hosting the debate and keeping people talking will be doing a great service to the public. Why wouldn’t an organization have a walled off op-ed section online, clearly signposted and thoughtfully curated, commissioning its own range of voices and linking to articles out from other news providers? Why wouldn’t they curate a range of podcasts from different perspectives, ensuring diversity of thought across the portfolio as a whole?

For PSBs, this will no doubt throw up some challenges. But from my initial conversations with regulators, there are no deal-breaking blockers. I think it’s time to trust that audiences are well-versed in navigating the difference between news and opinion, particularly if it’s clearly signposted. And I’ve just found myself wondering if we’ve now reached the tipping point where the risks of getting into this space are outweighed by the consequences of not doing so.

I think that might be enough provocation for one evening. So I’ll come to a close tonight. I wanted to run towards some inconvenient truths and to be clear about the scale of challenge, but I hope that I’ve also been clear that established news providers possess all the assets and the equity required to respond and to prevail. I believe we are in a new golden age of journalism. The explosion of new platforms has opened up new routes for journalists to reach consumers with more original, thoughtful, intelligent writing and storytelling than ever before. In a world of AI slop and exploitative algorithms, consumers are seeking out this journalism and choosing human to human connections.

As Ted Turner, the legendary media disruptor who we lost last week, would famously remind the CNN newsroom, the news is the star. I believe news is the star and must remain the star in this new world, and that’s up to us. So this dispatch is rooted in optimism and confidence in the future of established news providers, provided that they are willing to do what it takes to restore trust by understanding what drove the decline and how it can be reversed, to reconnect through authenticity, by coming to terms with what it will take to give consumers the authentic, independent voices they crave. Reinvent the newsroom by creating the flywheel news engine for growth across this fragmented landscape, and to consider how to become the town square, creating the meeting place for ideas that can be the antidote to the echo chamber.

If the established media can do all this, then I am confident it will not just survive, but it will thrive as an essential part of this revolution that’s reshaping news. Thank you very much.”