The theme of this issue of Fox Tales could be the accelerating pace of media change. There’s AI, an explosion of other technologies—especially around audience identification and engagement—the rise of events, and lots more.
We came across a blog post earlier this month that summarizes five media-company priorities for 2026, and our conclusion was that it was spot on. The post was written by Jodie Hopperton of the International News Media Association. Because it touches on universal issues and priorities, we want to share it with the readers of Fox Tales. Here, we review the post and add some context of our own.
The post itself comes out of a meeting of the INMA’s Product & Tech Advisory Council, which is made up of senior media product and technology leaders from around the world. Members of this council come from a disparate mix of company structures and served markets, but Hopperton reports that the conversation quickly converged even with the divergent perspectives. Here’s what they came up with.
Execution At Speed. Media companies, the post suggests, spent the last couple of years streamlining and simplifying. Now the focus shifts to their go-to-market strategy.
Product and engineering teams have converged, Hopperton says, around specific products. Rather than building brand by brand, they’re looking for foundational, scalable priorities that can be reused and adapted.
AI moves from the experimental to a core capability. The INMA post says that AI is expected to be embedded across a variety of functions, including product development, workflows, and monetization. We’ll just add here that this is absolutely true in our own experience.
Initiatives involving AI now have to generate ROI. We’ve observed an AI emphasis on revenue generation and content creation in particular. We’ve similarly seen a shift from efficiency and cost reduction (this is still important), to increasing speed to market and revenue lift.
Audience engagement is more dynamic. This is perhaps the most important observation of the five. Technology is now enabling deep insights into audience profiles and engagement patterns. These insights in turn enable smarter paywalls, dynamic pricing, and personalization that is capable of truly one-to-one marketing (see below for a caveat). Mapping powerful intent signals based on demographics and/or content engagement trigger all kinds of new revenue-producing possibilities, particularly in advertising and licensing, but also in product development and lifetime value.
Personalization remains a differentiator. The challenge, says Hopperton, is making it work across brands, platforms, and markets without unmanageable complexity. Technical challenges remain an issue. “Legacy front ends, fragmented data, and systems that don’t scale easily across organizations” become a bottleneck. The response? Modular architecture, off-the-shelf data products, and AI-assisted modernization allows teams to move faster without rebuilding an entire system.
Prep for a post-search, AI-based relationship with audiences. This is the era of Google Zero. The old search model is disappearing for media brands. Sure, it still exists in a sort of residual form, but now AI is the basis of audience engagement. “AI agents will increasingly sit between publishers and consumers,” according to the post. “This forces a rethink of discovery, branding, and loyalty. This rethink applies to the end-to-end news journey as well, and not just for humans, but for machines acting on their behalf.”
The upshot in all of this for us is that the technological tools now exist for richer audience engagement than ever before. And it comes hand in hand with the ability—and imperative—to shorten the product development process and move to market much faster.