[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. This is the final podcast of the year for me. Although we still have at least one more episode of People Versus Algorithms.
If you haven't checked out that podcast, please do. I am joined each week by Troy Young and Alex Schleifer to connect the dots in the rapidly changing information space.
Uh, in this episode of the Rebooting show, it is a live recording that we did last week at Gannett's headquarters in New York City.
I'm joined in this conversation by Kristen Roberts, Chief Content Officer at Gannett, Imtiaz Patel, the Chief Consumer Officer, Jason Taylor, Chief Sales Officer, and Ren Turiano, [laughs] Chief Product Officer.
A lot of chiefs. And we discuss basically how Gannett is using AI to grow its business, but it also turned into a far wider-ranging discussion around building publishing businesses in this fraught time.
I hope you enjoy it, and as always, please send me your feedback at bmorrissey@therebooting.com, and I hope everyone has a great holiday break. See you in twenty twenty-five. [upbeat music] All right.
Well, thank you all for, uh, joining us. The holidays... I know the holidays are very busy, but when, when Lark and I were ta- I think we started talking about this in Cannes.
We talked about doing this and, you know, I used-- at my former job, we used to do these, these live podcast events, and I really like them. And so I'm so glad. Thank you so much to Gannett for, for hosting us.
And when we were talking about what we wanted to do, I was like, "It's gotta be around AI," 'cause it's-- it comes up, like, everywhere.
But I think what's interesting to me about AI is that it's a catalyst for a lot of the changes that I know I've been, like, charting through my whole career.
I-I've been, like, writing about it and covering it as, like, an editor, but also sort of living it, I, I always say, because, you know, my first job, the magazine closed nine months later.
So I, I understand this industry, and I was just talking with Mike a-and I was joking that there are much, much easier ways to make money than media.
And I think AI is coming at a time of obviously profound change in how people access information.
And if we think about AI, to me, what it is really best at, you know, o-on a technical level, it's really good at summarization, it's really good at, at versioning, and it's really good at optimization.
And what I wanted to have a discussion here, a conversation really, with all parts of the business, right? About...
Because this is, like, a time when every single media entity sort of needs to really face some existential questions about how they're going to reorient their businesses beyond just the regular business pressures that are out there.
But this, what feels like a change, it feels like we're moving into a different sort of era with AI, and we can talk about whether that exists.
But I think to me, the, you know, media sometimes is made more complicated than it is.
There's a lot of complicated parts to it, but where I wanna, like, sort of have this conversation is around really some basic things about what do you create? How do you, how do you distribute it?
And then how do you make money off it? 'Cause that's pretty much, I think, the media industry. So let's just go around so everyone introduces. I'm Brian. Ren, do you wanna start? Sure. I'm Ren. Come on. [laughs] Come on.
I'm, I'm, I'm Ren Turiano. I'm the Chief Product Officer here at Gannett. Okay. Kristen? I'm Kristen Roberts.
I'm the Chief Content Officer, which means I am responsible for every stitch of content that comes out of this joint, from the news through the sports, through the entertainment, across all of our content types, from print to digital, to video, to podcast and other types of audio.
Excellent. Excellent. I'm Imtiaz Patel, Chief Consumer Officer, which means I own all consumer revenue, subscriptions, monetization of our consumer base, marketing, branding, that kind of stuff. And I'm Jason Taylor.
I am Chief Sales Officer for Gannett, and I oversee basically our B2B business, so all of our advertising B2B type business. Yeah. So Kristen, I wanna start with you because it's about what you make.
'Cause ultimately, like, you have to make that decision. I know that sounds, like, sort of basic, but you make a lot of different types of content.
Give me the breakdown of what you make now, and then I, I wanna talk about how that is gonna change. Of what we make now? Yeah. Well, we make all types of content now, and there's a...
there are a couple different ways to slice that. You can think about it...
The easiest way, I would say, to think about it is to think about USA Today, where we create content in different genres, different subject areas. So there's news, but there's also other pillars of content.
There is sports, and there's entertainment, and there's life, and there's money, for example. We also create by format type. We create a huge amount of video. We create a larger amount of text.
We create an enormous amount of audio. We also create things that are what I would classify as information. It's not news.
It might not even be new, but it is information people need in the moment, and we will call that things like service journalism.
So for example, how do I watch Peyton and Eli's show instead of the regular broadcast on NFL? And if you type that into Google, we will f- we will show up on that.
That's the kind of stuff that is SEO optimized and serves a purpose in that it recognizes that we serve a sports audience.
So we have information, we have recipes on our flanker brands like Southern Kitchen, and then we have your news content, your breaking news content on The Arizona Republic, your breaking news content on USA Today.
It runs the gamut. Did I answer your question or did I miss it? No, I think you answered the question. Great. So how does it need to change, right? Like, I mean, 'cause I think about...
I wanna talk about the article page for a little bit. Oh, I love the article page. [laughs] Let's talk about the article, right? Yeah. Like, the articleIs so old, right? The artic...
Like, if you think about it, the inverted pyramid- Mm-hmm... the seven hundred word. I mean, this is coming from like typeface era, right? And it needs to be reinvented.
I think there's some people that are trying to reinvent. I don't know if you saw, like Every has an interesting experiment where you can where you can like query the story.
Because as you know, like as a journalist, you choose what you put in there, you choose what you do not put in there, and- An editor said to me today...
Didn't say to me, said to me in a group meeting, "If it isn't a headline, it didn't happen."
Because they were talking about something that was buried within the story, and there was a real opportunity to pull it out, and it was part of the, it was part of the murder of the, of the healthcare CEO.
And we had a little tidbit of reporting, but it was in paragraph whatever, and if we had pulled it out, it would've been an opportunity to reach more audience. But that speaks to exactly what you're talking about.
The article format is in large part broken, and so how do you reimagine that article format? But lots of things have to change beyond just the layout of that.
Lots of things have to change for organizations like ours just in terms of the format, but also we have to begin to think about what are the implications of all of our content being gobbled up by whoever is out there.
What that means is that we need to actually get back to the beauty of what once was journalism, which is telling people things they don't already know, being first and best, being exclusive, being distinctive.
And I think our industry, in the chase for page views to stay alive, had to move away from that in part.
And now we have the wonderful opportunity to embrace AI and automation and serve the information needs of people, and then use our real people to go back and get back into the habit of actual journalism. Mm-hmm.
So how are you u- uh, how or are you using AI at all within what you create? Well, we use AI in multiple ways, and I'm sure that all of my friends up here wanna talk about that as well as I do. Yeah.
But I just wanna like... How do you use it to make better journalism? No, I, I, I, i- in many, many ways, and I think...
When I think about AI, and Ren and I talk about this all the time, the uh, there are multiple categories here, right? We talk about AI that is simply automation. It's not really special, it's just automation.
We think about AI that is actually generating content, and who is the audience for that content? Is it an internal audience?
Like, is it giving me or my reporter something to follow up on, or is it, is the audience actually external?
And so we're doing a number of experiments, and our partners in the UK in Newsquest did a lot of work on this for us.
They took a lot of the wonderful, healthy risks to experiment with how we could use a closed, trusted information system, use AI to take information and turn it into articles. And one of the, one of the things that I...
In fact, there are a couple things I'm really excited about from their experimentation that we're going to be doing here, but one of them in particular is this idea of reconnecting with your super local communities and taking those things that our news reporters used to do, like community announcements.
You think about the pancake breakfast at the local church. Yeah. Right? We used to actually write stories about the pancake breakfast, and then we stopped writing stories because our newsrooms got so small.
But what happened then is that our newspapers began to lose their authority in the community because they weren't really covering these hyper local things that were very, very important to actual human beings.
And what Newsquest has done is gone out to the community and said, "We'll take those announcements again."
And they have AI-assisted reporters who take those announcements, put it into the system, it creates a completely accurate, frankly kind of entertaining story from it.
It's read by a human, 'cause we always have a human in the loop on everything we do in AI, and then we publish it.
But it's allowed us to increase the amount of content that is incredibly relevant at a n- at a micro level in our communities. That's one of the, I don't know, a dozen ways that we're using it- Yeah...
inside of our newsrooms. So Ren, I, I, I think I've asked you this before, but like do you really believe people are gonna be hitting the back button after reading like a webpage, an article on a webpage in five years?
I don't think they're necessarily doing that even now. I think they're finding something on the same page and allowing that to continue their journey on the domain if they don't abandon.
So what do you n- Like, how do you see AI changing what you need to make the containers for content? M- Making...
So if you have a long form piece of content that's well written, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have the maximal audience that wants to read a long form piece of content.
So if you can take that content and summarize it or turn it into different formats to either find consumers in the channels where they already are or to give them the type of content that they want in terms of format when they're in your domain, then what you can do is also use generative AI to promote related stories and other content for them right there in that same context.
So it's the same sort of architecture that you have for a traditional webpage or a traditional browse experience.
It's just that instead of being top to bottom, it's, it's in, it's inside out so that you can send them in all the different directions that they may want to go right from that core place. How did they get there?
Maybe right now they got there from Google, but we also wanna make sure that we can, we build all the ways we can to be able to, uh, ha- get that traffic in there by other means, and so that we're less dependent on traffic from Google, even though we also wanna of course maximize the value of Google traffic like everyone else does.
But I'm, I hope I'm answering your question. Yeah. It's really about not sending them out, not giving them a default to abandon, but giving them a default to do something else. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
But like, I, I guess that goes into the, the distribution question, which is... I mean, this is something every publisher is dealing with.
They're dealing with less traffic.No, we're not I know, but most publishers are, are dealing with- Well, then ask them.
I mean, we have the largest audience in America by a mile Do you think you're going to have more traffic from Google in three years than you have now?
I think I'll get it from somewhere else Your recipe content will- Yes, we'll get it from somewhere else. For eight... F-for more than a year and a half- Fair...
we've been growing audience by twenty percent month after month after month, and it's not... That's not a mistake, it's not happenstance, it's not a trick.
We have a strategy and we have a set of tactics, and they deliver to an audience because we're listening to the audience. We're watching their behavior- Yeah...
on our platforms, all of our platforms, and we're making decisions multiple times in a single day to understand and to give them what they tell us through their behavior that they want and need.
That's how we grow audience. So you can say everybody's losing audience. We're not losing audience, and we have no intention of losing audience, and now we have an incredible track record showing that we won't. Yeah.
So w- So explain then like how you're trying to sort of... I mean, because I understand that and that's great.
I g- I think a lot of publishers would love to understand the, the secret to growing audience at a time when Google has become less reliable for a lot of publishers. We have organic traffic.
We have search traffic from Google. We have traffic from, you know, we have direct traffic from other referrals.
We have traffic from aggregators, and we have of course consumers who organically self-serve their way right to our domains because it's a branded destination.
None of those things are, are going to keep them there necessarily, and none of those... Not all of those things are gonna be there forever as means by which we get traffic in.
So what we're doing is we're working very, very hard to build direct relationships with our consumers, and we're committed to being able to traffic consumers better once they're on our domains so that they're higher...
They have greater engagement, and we maximize our benefit to them and their benefit to us within our domain.
We've become a reliable place to go and solve problems, a diverse range of problems, rather than just the problem of what's in the news.
Which, you know, I'm grateful for consumers that come to us to wanna know that, whether they get to us through a link referral from Google or whether they come to us because they're interested in the USA Today or more critically their local paper.
But we want them to be able to have other reasons to come to us, the kind of reasons that they had in the past that, that, that dwindled and that we're trying to reinvigorate.
We want to have more direct commerce for consumers. We wanna have more service journalism, more, more evergreen content for, for them to come and solve problems.
More trending content that helps them to make decisions about things that are happening, you know, currently in the news or currently in the zeitgeist.
And the more of the problems that we can give people to solve, the more we'll be able to expand their repertoire on our domains, and then the more they'll think of us as a destination first rather than just the place that they happen to have showed up when they were following a subject through a, a Google link.
Yeah. We used to call that bookmark traffic. Remember that? Yes. We used to call that bookmark traffic. And, you know, you are right to point out that Google puts its finger on the scale whenever it wants to.
It's a monopoly. That's what it does, and it exerts monopoly power. I'm glad we can finally say it. [laughing] It do- it does what it wants. A- I mean, it never...
Google never gave guidance for a reason, because it didn't have to. Didn't have to. It could make its numbers anything. It just... You just change the number of ads on the page- So is that what we're talking about?
Because just don't get me started with that. Really? [laughing] Yeah. Let it out. Well, you know, w-we-we're a good partner to Google, and we, and we wanna be enriched by them. We do. You know?
And as a partner, we want to have the traffic, all of the traffic. Sure, we'll take it from anywhere, anywhere. Yeah.
But we wanna have control, and we wanna make sure that we have a business if their caprice, you know, sends them one way or another, you know, and they create random decisions.
We wanna make sure that we still have a business- Yeah... whe-when they, when they do that. But can you... Are you truly in control of your business when you do not control most of your distribution?
We are, and we're more and more and more in control of our business every day. And actually, we have them to thank for a little of that. We were spurned to make greater and faster progress by them. Yep.
And we've been very successful at doing that, at compensating. If they take an action against us, we don't understand the action.
It is something we're compliant, you know, we think we're compliant, and then we work really hard with them as partners to try to figure out how to- Is this the, like, the-... come back into compliance...
the, what is it? The site reputation- Yeah. The-... abuse? Yeah. The m- the deindexing. Manual actions. Yeah. A-anyway.
W-what, what, what we're being inspired to do is the things that we should be doing anyway, more of the things that we're already doing, which is to create reasons for consumers to come directly to our domain- Yeah...
and for more reasons for them to stay when they get here rather than dropping in for a single story. And I, I love my single story traffic too, you know. Everybody's welcome.
If they wanna come and just read a story and go do something else, then I think that's great. But I really, really wanna give them more reasons to stay and more reasons to decide to come to our domains. Yeah.
Let's talk about making money. MJ, how... What are the challenges for publishers, like a publisher like Gannett, to become sort of cus- like customer focused and customer, like, audience focused?
Because usually, you know, most publishers are in... There was a little lighting change. That's good. Mood lighting. It's good. I like it. You know, usually it's...
it, you know, these, these businesses, it's an indirect business model in which most of the revenue is coming from, you know, B2B, I guess it would be called in this instance. Yeah.
You know, for, for us, we do have a significant amount of direct revenue, right? Subscriptions. We have a very large subscriber base, over two million digital subscribers, over a million print subscribers.
So it is a big business for us. Now, the challenge historically has been that without the data, without...
The way we've been approaching this is thinking about, like, one size fits all, talking to customers exactly the same way. With greater data, what we can do now is really have different conversations with different-...
people and really think about their interest and what are they interested in and how do we message them, how do we connect with them, how do we appeal to them.
One of, one of the things, and I know we're gonna go down the AI path with this, what I'm really e- excited about is how we can have much more contextual conversations, right?
If I understand your profile, your behavior, when we interact with you, I can use that information to have a really connected conversation, a very specific conversation to you as a consumer. Right?
That improves your experiences with us. It allows us to better meet your needs. And really thinking about... We, we talk a lot about the customer journey, right? What's their journey?
What journey should they be going on? So that allows us to get much more specific. You can almost get to a point of a one-to-one relationship, and AI allows us to kinda do that.
Historically, we just can't do it, because at our scale and with the number of people coming in at us, it's just physically hard to do. But AI and data and connecting all the bits allows us to do that.
So give me an example of how AI enables that. So let, let's say you're a consumer who calls into a call center, right? And you have... You're calling in because you're thinking about canceling. Let's use that use case.
Now, by connecting our consumer database, right, and understanding your profile, understanding your behavior, and the ag- and connecting that to the agent interface, an agent can see what you've been using, how often you've been using, and really think about...
well, talk about the value of the content you've been using and make it so specific to the type of things you're reading, right? So now it's not a generic conversation. Now it is a conversation based on you.
And we can then think about how to save that customer and show them the value of the product they're getting. But now, if it gets down to price, we can also get very specific around price, right?
So if someone's a highly engaged user, I don't need to cut price to the lowest level, right?
There's another level of pricing that I can provide that probably retains some revenue for us but makes them also feel like they're getting value. So this is like an exchange we've got going on there.
That's just one case, and there's a lot of different use cases like that. Okay. So, like, the saves team can have more ammo. Yeah, more ammo. But it's smart, right?
We can't train every single agent, and we've got over four hundred agents, right? We can't train every single agent for every single use case.
But now with AI Assist, based on the profile, we can put in some rules that then creates a very specific way for the agent to respond. And it learns, right?
And it can keep improving on that based on the kind of results we're seeing. Yeah.
Jason, I wanna get into the AI thing, but, like, I think one of the conversations that's been going on a long time really is around can advertising truly support, like, an ambitious news business, right?
I mean, advertisers have fled from news. There's a lot of initiatives that... about bringing advertisers back to news, right? And I'm, like, of two minds about it. I think it's, like, great. I support it, obviously.
Uh, but at the same time, I feel like a lot of these things are acting like it's a charity or something. It's some sort of initiative to, to give back to the community.
Whereas, you know, you've gotta create economic value, like, long term. What do you, in your conversations with advertisers, like, how can you become... how can news become essential to, to their, their strategies?
I think it starts by, you know, the conversation of, of what Kristen was saying earlier. It's more than just news. It's content, right?
And we have to think about it as content, and how do we slice and dice that content to drive performance for that customer or that brand's needs.
What puts us in a unique position, or a unique value proposition, if you will, is the depth, breadth, and scale of our organization, right?
Because we're in so many markets across the country, we have so many active advertisers. You can say, "Oh, these advertisers don't wanna be around news," or, "They don't wanna be..."
We've thousands of active advertisers, right?
So if we can take the learnings from a florist in Austin, Texas, and take those same learnings and what we learn from the campaign, from the management of the campaign, from the delivery of the campaign, from the optimization of the campaign, and apply those same learnings to Nashville, Tennessee, to a florist, then we can drive their business.
So the result is there regardless of, of their opinion about being adjacent to news or being adjac- You know.
Whereas at the same time, there's that evergreen content or that, that, that helpful content of, of solving problems, et cetera, that really can drive a premium, because if I'm looking up what's the best cruise line, or how do I plan a cruise, I can drive a premium by putting cruise brands next to that.
It may not be what you think of as news, but that's valuable news to a consumer. That's valuable, valuable content to a consumer.
And now as we look at the next generation, you know, when I'm, when I'm looking at awards coverage for entertainment and I see what they're wearing and I have an interest in that, can I have a shopping carousel next to that, right?
There, there's... I, I just think it's gonna continue... it's going to continue to evolve and, and we just have to be there regardless of what it's adjacent to.
If a customer wants to be adjacent to a certain kind of content that will deliver a premium for them in terms of client purchase, client activation, we can deliver that.
But if they just want sheer volume, magnitude, and learnings, that's a unique thing that we can do as well, so- Why do you think that they, that they don't find value in that? They...
Why would they even do it if they didn't find value? They do f- they absolutely do find value, and I think we're looking for it.
All of these problems are solved all the same way.More traffic, deeper engagement, more reasons to come, more reasons to stay equal more reasons to subscribe, more reasons to not cancel a subscription equals more reasons to buy advertising in a contextual advertising context or a premium advertising context.
I think the thing that's in jeopardy is pro-programmatic advertising, and I think that's the thing that we're, we're also, I hope it's okay to say, less interested in, in, in having that as a, as the, the biggest driver of business for us.
But sponsorship is immensely important- Yeah... both to the advertiser as well as to us because we have the audience.
And if we can demonstrate that the audience is understood, and also that it's bigger and getting bigger, and it's staying longer, and it's committed to us, that drives tremendous value for, for them. Yeah.
I think the argument would be that, you know, so much of the market has shifted to performance, right?
And, and so much has shifted to programmatic because there's a lot of interest that to, to shove more d- through programmatic pipes, right? And, you know, Google has like a Pmax or something.
Ultimately, you have to perform, right? Mm-hmm. And I think that to me is when I, when I see these initiatives to support news, it's not saying...
It's saying you should support news because it's important for democracy, et cetera. It's not saying you're gonna sell more of what, like stuff. That, I think that's just one way that- Right...
that the message is delivered. I think it's fine. I personally have never been a big fan of this idea of news as a charitable thing. I think that it's worth paying for, certainly worth sponsoring. And I, I wanna...
I'm committed to making it more worth sponsoring and more worth paying for.
And, and I think too within our own organization, what we're seeing is that open exchange programmatic revenue is starting to shift into a more direct premium delivered programmatic that's direct sold by our, by a, by a, a sales representative who's working alongside an account to drive a more premium rate, a more premium result, a more premium return.
And I think we'll see more and more of that over time.
And, and I, and then the last thing I would comment on, I think when I look at like Kristen's organization, my organization, it-it's a parallel track in that sometimes the ideation comes from her side to ours, and then we have to figure out how to monetize it.
Sometimes it's our side to her saying, "We know there's a lot of revenue being spent in this category. If you can give us the right content, we can drive a premium and align behind that."
And, and I think that's one of the things that's driving our return to success. Yeah. How do you think about the user experience? I mean, local news sites, I gotta be honest, they can be rough. They're, they're way...
It's really bad in the UK, but it's- [chuckles] I mean, right? Like it's really bad. Some of it's really bad. [chuckles] How do you think?
Because like I always feel like there's, there's such pressure where, you know, particularly for news content, but not exclusively, right?
Like I always joke that the jump to recipe button is, is just a failure of the open web. [chuckles] The fact that that exists is just a complete failure.
And because it, it shows that Google sets bad incentives- Absolutely... and then blames the people who follow the incentives that Google set- Yes... and they penalize them.
Just like those, you know, those stories that are essentially restating the premise over and over throughout- Yeah... a long portion of the article before resolving it.
It's simply because they want you to keep scrolling, so they restate the question, and they restate the premise, and they do it again, and then they do it again, they do it again, and sometimes they don't even resolve it at all.
Yeah. But how do you all strike that balance, right? 'Cause there's a lot of... There are a lot of incentives to push the user experience as, as far as possible out there.
I mean, you know, putting more ads on the page, more autoplay video- I don't think that's true anymore. No? I think there are... If we're looking at just lift up and out of the, the moment, right?
If you look a few years down the line, we need to be in a different place. This, and bringing it back to the conversation around AI. Mm-hmm. You know, as, as we...
We need to begin to establish a direct relationship, reestablish the direct relationship with our users, with our readers, and our viewers, and our listeners, and the only way to do that sustainably is to create an experience that is somehow satisfying, that doesn't punch them in the face with ad after ad after ad and pop-ups, and get them back to a place where they actually really enjoy being.
That's the future that we're trying to create. We look at our story pages, and we see the same thing that you do.
We don't put on our blinders about how dissatisfying that experience is, but one of the key initiatives of the next year that Ren is partnering with all of us on is actually taking a look at that and taking a clean slate approach to it.
How do we create a more premium feeling experience? Because a more premium feeling experience will allow MTS to sell more subscriptions. It will allow Jason to sell more premium advertising.
It will allow me to hold onto people for longer so that they experience more of the products that Ren is creating. We can't continue with a user experience that it is right now. It might serve a revenue- Yeah...
it might allow us to do revenue triage today, but at the expense of a year from now, and we've all recognized that, and we're holding hands and jumping together. Well, it trains, it trains people.
It trains users, like, right? Like, I mean, when you're clicking on a link- It trains them to go away. Well, yeah. That's what I mean.
If you're like- It trains them to look and jump, and you can see that in duration on article, for example. You can see that on the lack of frequency.
You can see that on the lack of second assets en-encountered or, or, or the third asset encountered. They're not clicking again. They're not staying with us. They're, they're one and dones. They're drive-by readers.
We have to actually change that, and the only way to do it is by all of us, all of the leadership of Gannett Media, holding hands and saying- Yeah... these guys are willing to experiment.
They're willing to experiment because we know over the long haul we will get more revenue out of a better, more streamlined experience.
It's, it's very, it's also very difficult toEvolve an ad experience without, without making it less, less revenue or less performant.
But I think that the reasons that that's difficult are kind of industry reasons, and I really feel that there are ways that you can use design, and you can use data, of course, too, to be able to surface an ad experience that is less interruptive and less offensive to consumers to the extent that it is already, and still maximizing the revenue potential.
First, by being just smarter about how you sell it, because we really want more of the kinds of things that require less touch, but more presence for the brand sponsored things.
But also by simply improving the way that the ad experience itself behaves, like a video player or the ads themselves, in ways that maximize the value without, without making a more cluttered experience.
Because the overall revenue that you get from a page will absolutely go down the more things you pile on. There's a tipping point.
The other thing that we really wanna do is we mentioned contextual advertising, but also sponsorship.
It's premium sponsorship, contextual advertising itself, which is really destination, you know, based advertising, and also shoppable experiences within an article page.
You know, people are hunter-gatherers, and they love to shop, and I've been in this business for a long time, and don't tell me people don't like ads.
What they don't like is terrible ads that mean nothing to them, that are intrusive, that stop them on their mission.
But they certainly like to shop for things, and if they see things that they find interesting and compelling... You know, Instagram itself is a perfect example.
Everybody says this, but Instagram has the least offensive ads o-of any, you know, media channel. And now the ads on Instagram are directly shoppable. And I think people...
The only ads I ever click on personally are on Instagram because I just can't help it because it looks so compelling. Doesn't mean I'm gonna buy anything, but I, you know, I do click on them. Yeah.
No, it's the best ad experience [crosstalking]. And that's the destination for it. You know, a year ago- But, but, but you're in the mode, right? I think that is the struggle for publishers is you- Well, that...
So how, so you gotta create the mode. Yeah. That's what... A year ago, people said to me, "Nobody wants to shop, to shop on an article page because they see it as interacting with an ad, which is dangerous and unknown."
Yeah. I think that's changed a lot just in the last year. You know, people, people are quite happy, I think, to shop things based...
It all depends on how it's designed and how it's presented and what kind of brand familiarity they have.
And once we break through that barrier where consumers are less, or are less worried about doing that or think it's less incongruous, the, the, the, the better it'll be for everyone.
Because you'll have a cleaner, more enriching experience that provides something that consumers actually want, rather than something that feels to them like a value exchange. Yeah. So Kristen, do you use Perplexity?
Mm-hmm. What do you think about it? What's the real question? [laughing] Depends on your answer. I-I'm not offended by it.
[chuckles] No, I'm just wondering when you think about, like, you know, obviously creating useful content, right? Like of... for instance, recipe content, right? Mm-hmm. I use Perplexity for recipes all the time.
It returns, like, what I want. I don't wade through the story about the, the person's grandmother in Tuscany or whatever. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's better, right?
And I, I wonder about user expectations as these AI engines become agentic- Totally... et cetera. It, it already feels a lot of times, not Gannett sites, I'll just leave that aside.
But on a lot of publisher, other publisher sites- Mm-hmm... it feels like stepping back in time now.
I think ahead in a couple years when people are regularly getting things just brought to them almost, like, seamlessly, what is the incentive to go out to get that kind of useful content?
We used to call it evergreen content at our service company. Yeah, we call it service journalism now, and, and it- Yeah. I think there's a couple things, and I, I, I would take it and pull it apart a little bit.
And, you know, there is still some of that in Gannett. I appreciate you being nice, but or anticipating my pushback. I don't like it hustled out. Well, you know, listen [chuckles]. It's a dangerous neighborhood. Yeah.
You know, team hustle on right here. Obviously, you brought it, you brought it up. First Luigi reference.
So listen, fundamentally, the things we produce and the format we put it in has to change, and a lot of that is already happening. And you're right to point out recipes. It's a wonderful example.
We struggled with this last year.
How do we produce re-recipe schema that allows us to actually capture and present what people want rather than leading them through a circuitous path so they can have a million programmatic ads thrown at their face while they're just trying to figure out how much sugar they need for this recipe, right?
But I think a hu... The thing that we, that I'm a little bit worried about you missing when you're thinking about Gannett is you keep talking about news. News is really one component. Yes, it's the crown jewel.
Yes, that's why people come to us.
Yes, that's actually our mission and our purpose, but our mission and our purpose are also in simply being essential to the communities that we're serving, all the various communities that we're serving, and news is not the only way that we're essential.
We're also essential by providing them recipes. We're also essential by providing them high school sports scores.
We're also essential by simply telling them how the overturned tractor trailer on I-95 is going to affect their ability to get their children to school that morning, right?
Like, these are the ways that we're essential, and how we deliver that to them is no longer and has not been for a very long time an inverted pyramid story. Mm-hmm.
It's through push, it's through newsletters, it's through alerts, it's, it's running alerts at the top of our homepages. It's... and also stories, right? There are a million things. You know what else it is?
In the hurricanes, it was SMS text, right? It was saying to the community, "We know your web is gonna be down, and you're not gonna be... Your Wi-Fi's gonna be down, and you're not gonna be able to load web pages.
So instead, send us a text, and we'll give you every single update you need during this storm and for days and days afterward."
Like, that is how you serve the community, and that's how you restructure how you deliver information. It's not just a th- you know, a 500, 700-word story anymore, and it hasn't been for a really long time.
Mm-hmm.Brian, I wanna, I wanna, I'll just, I wanna say something about Perplexity, if you don't mind. Okay. So I, I think Perplexity is a wonderful user experience.
And where before have we ever seen a business that was a platform whose goal was to build an enormous unmonetized audience and then be successful on the, that basis?
We've seen that a lot, that social media, but it doesn't stay that way.
So if, if things go the way that some of these new, these new products want it to go, these new services would like it to go, they will be a cleaner experience without monetization, largely free of all the clutter, providing exactly what the consumer needs without even the distraction of our brands and, you know, and our attribution and our full story, while as long as it takes them to drive us out of business, and then once we're out of business, they're going to start piling all that monetization back onto their products.
And this is just a classic market entry, you know, approach. It's what Uber did. It's what a lot of them do.
And my, my aim is to be as much as we can like a Perplexity in the ways that it's good because there are a lot of good things that are very good about it.
It's a wonderful experience to use and, you know, adapt to this s- this circumstance and be able to remain strong or remain viable and remain, you know, leaning into what the consumers really need and what, what we know we can uniquely give them until the point comes when a Perplexity or another thing like it has to figure out that they have to pile on monetization or they have to get out of business.
Like, how can you stay in during that aggressive market entry that discounted or no-cost products, you know, that, that methodology that they follow, that they followed all through for decades very, very successfully.
You go in cheap, saturate, and then once you've cleared all the competition, you, then you bury the consumer with new fees and, and other monetization, and that's absolutely what they're all gonna do.
And how can we endure and thrive until that storm has passed or, or even push the storm out of the way? Yeah. I mean, look at Uber, right? I mean, like, I was a little south of here. I was going a mile the other night.
It said it was eighty bucks. Exactly. So they, they, they, they could- That's how I remember. Yep. And that, and that is- That's the subway. And that was not an accident. [laughs] Not an accident.
And that model is the model that they're, that they all follow. Yeah. Do you th- do you consider these AI engines like friends or foe? Both. I mean, I think we can absolutely work with them.
I think we want to work with them. And I think that by working with us, they would have a better product. Mm-hmm.
I don't think it's a, it's a, it's just a, you know, a, a ransom, you know, that, that, that we're looking for. And I... That's not at all the way I think we should work with them.
I see, I see them as a foe, and they show up like a foe, and I see them as a friend when we're able to work together to create a better collective experience for the consumer and a business that sustains everybody.
I think sometimes they take a while to see where the value could be, but I think that they seem to get there, you know, and that's, that's the, the tricky middle. Yeah. Jason, is, is...
Would a broken up Google be positive for publishers? Ooh, pick me. Yeah. [laughs] You can go next. I mean, I, I, I th- I think y-yes, in, in many ways, obviously.
You know, it's our business we're constantly having to pivot based on decisions that Google is making, and that just, it's, it's hamstringing for us. Yeah.
You know, and, and so that's where- It was the most reliable and then it became unreliable- Exactly... because it's under pressure. That's, that's a good point. Yeah. So I, I think that's, you know...
Anything that would remove that shackle would be helpful, you know, for us to drive a strategy that we have more control over day to day.
We're gaining it on our own, but at the same time, if, if, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to navigate.
The curve balls that are thrown to us on any given month, in any given month, create a lot of challenge for the business. Okay. Kristen, what were you gonna say? No, I think Jason's brilliant. Yeah. And Jeff?
Write that down. Write that down. [laughs] I know. I know. What, what are, what are your sort of...
I mean, like, 'cause I think one of the things with the, the, the, the Google question when it comes to breaking up particularly their ad tech, is whether it would result in a, in a healthier ecosystem for, for publishers creating high quality content.
Depends on the, on the requirements attached to that. Yeah. Agree. If the remedies include control over how their, the new entities are able to operate, then it would. Otherwise, it won't. Right.
One thing on, like, subscriptions, and I'm wondering how AI... Like, you mentioned a couple of, you know, examples with sort of, you know, customer service and whatnot, but, like, how can...
Particularly when people are... People are gonna be paying for a lot of these AI agent services, right? And I think they're figuring out what the, the price point is, right?
And I just think everything is just, like, with subscriptions. Everything... Like, you're paying a lot in subscriptions, I think we all know right now.
How do you think that'll end up affecting the sort of the, the market for, for, you know, Gannett content? I, I think we're already seeing subscription fatigue in general. I mean, I'll use my example.
I didn't realize how many subscriptions I paid for, and I used Rocket Money. I think I saved a few hundred bucks a month, right?
Just going through and finding subscriptions that I'm paying for that I really shouldn't be paying for. So we're already seeing a lot of subscription fatigue in the industry. So it's not like it's coming.
It's here, right? So what we have to really think about is what's the value we're giving consumers? And as long as we're giving value, they will pay for the value, right? But we also have to...
It can't be a model where, where it's all ads or it's all subscriptions, right?
We really have to think about how do you optimize across all different revenue sources?So one of the things we're thinking about also is how else can I monetize my consumer base?
Yeah, obviously we do content licensing and stuff like that, but is there a way we can get into the commerce game? Is, is there... We just launched a wine club.
Are there other things we can do around experiences that tie to our content so that gives us permission to sell them other things? So are there alternative ways to monetize people as well?
So that's really where we've gotta go, and I do still believe we as an organization can actually grow our subscribers because we're seeing it in our traffic, right? That says that people want this content.
Now, some of it people will pay for, some of it they won't. So we've gotta get smarter about what pieces of it that they're gonna pay for. We also have to move away from this notion of everyone wants...
will buy a subscription to a general news site, and they will go down the vertical that they care about, or the interest, or the area that they care about. Is it sports? Is it food? Is it work, right?
So how can we create subscription products or m- products monetized differently around those interest areas?
We've gotta come at it in a much smarter and a more complex way as well, but it's about monetizing in different ways. If we just rely on subscriptions, that's not gonna work.
On subscriptions, are you using, like, AI to optimize when you, when you block people and what you- Yes... offer them? We have s- launched a dynamic paywall in a number of our sites. We're tweaking it right now.
We will be fully launched in the first half of next year, where all our sites being, except USA Today, being on a dynamic paywall.
Yeah, we also have a lo- fairly advanced propensity modeling that we're, you know, that, that we've developed and that we're continuing to evolve, and that extends to propensity to do any kind of valuable action.
But it's important for us to make sure that the action that's valuable for us is also valuable for the consumer, and that, that isn't, that's not obvious because w- if you're tricking someone into some sort of action that's good for the business but will alienate the consumer, then that's not good.
And so propensity can help us to do that as well, to figure out the thing that's gonna maximize the value for the consumer as well as for us, whether it's advertising revenue or a subscription to one thing, or even just a registration or engagement of any kind, signing up for a newsletter- Yeah...
whatever the kind of thing. Will you use that to optimize the, the, the user experience, like, overall? Backwards, you know.
So if you, if you create user journeys that end up with dead ends, if you have a long tail of content that nobody consumes, you have to examine why. Is it because it's not interesting?
Is it because it didn't get in front of the right people? You know, so all of those things, tho- we, we, we, we do use, we will use those propensity signals to, to back into user experience improvements.
Traditionally, we improve the user experience based on looking at, you know, exemplars and benchmarks out in the world, and we say, "Oh, I'm really jealous of how that thing looks."
And that's, that isn't at all the way to, to improve a user experience. W- if you, if you use...
If you're informed entirely by data or largely by data and not by the competitive edge that we all, in our conceit, want to reach for, especially if you're a designer or if you're just somebody who is own- owns this thing and you're proud of it, then you'll see that the consumer will tell you through their behavior that they want something that isn't the thing you think you wanna give them necessarily, you know?
Like, they'll tell you that something's good enough when it's not, when it's not maybe good enough for us.
They'll tell you that something that we think is good enough isn't, isn't good enough for them in terms of the user experience and the kind of thing that we surface for them. We have to be led by them.
It has to be outside in, uh, entirely to get it right, and data tells us what to do, and data will also tell us whether we're doing it or not- Right... correctly. Okay. That's a great, that's a great way to end this.
So thank you. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts, and thank you all for coming, and we'll have a few drinks afterwards too if you wanna stick around. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
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