Over 500 media and publishing professionals have gathered in the beautiful Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid to hear leading speakers discuss their strategies for thriving in today’s landscape.
ChatGPT, AI overviews and traffic challenges are certainly top of mind for many delegates, but the on-stage conversations haven’t been quite as dominated by AI as we’d expected. Rather, there seems to be a doubling down on good, ‘old fashioned’ publishing principles like investing in high-quality content and products in order to secure growth.
Here are some of the key themes from the main stage on day 1 of the Congress.
A key moment of transformation
A number of the speakers have highlighted the urgency of this moment for publishers. The digital age may have crept up, but businesses cannot afford to react slowly to the challenges and changes ongoing now.
“We think that we are at this critical pivotal moment of transformation and you need to embrace it,” Mark Howard, COO at TIME told Yulia Boyle. “You need to lean into it and every day filter everything through your own lens of your own business and being that best version of yourself.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Lucy Küng, Professor, Advisor, NED and Author. She spoke alongside A Media Operator’s Jacob Donnelly and AZURE’s Jacqueline Loch about the rise of creators, and how established media can lean into creator growth.
“This is going to go so much faster, has already gone faster,” she said, talking about the speed at which the creator economy has changed. “If you look at digital, the industry changed, developed products, we’ve brought the audience along. The audience is already in the creator economy, they’re very happy there…. Advertisers are there as well. The habits are entrenched. It’s a party that is happening that essentially classic media now has to gate crash.”
Despite the relative slowness of the industry to respond to more rapid change, there were many stories of growth shared on FIPP’s stage. TIME COO Mark Howard shared that their advertising revenue from direct sales is up 23%, their events business revenue has grown by 50%, and they have their youngest ever audience, half of which is under 35.
“Consumer behavior is again, radically changing,” he pointed out. “The mechanisms with which people consume content and information is a completely new paradigm and we wanted our brand to best show up and be represented in those environments.”
Opportunities for innovation
Another underlying theme was the wealth of opportunities still available for savvy publishers, whether that be in brand extensions, product launches, or even new publications.
The Economist is a leading publication which seems incredibly resilient to many of the threats highlighted by others. Speaking to Flashes & Flames’ Colin Morrison, The Economist President Luke Bradley Jones said that steady, sustainable growth is one of their core measures of success.
“We’re trying to tread a fine line between not going gangbusters on top-line because that dilutes your profits, not just trying to maximize for profitability because you undermine your growth prospects; but we’re trying to tread that middle path of steady growth,” he explained. “We want to sustain and safeguard our unique editorial voice for the next 180 years just as we have for the last 180. And we believe that right now our brand of journalism, so independent, fact-based, fearless in our point of view, is more rare and more important than ever before.”
It’s not just the legacy brands which are seizing opportunities. Semafor, which has just celebrated its third birthday, now has over 1 million newsletter subscribers, 30% of which are C-suite.
“We see readers that need products that are not being offered by traditional media. We see advertisers and sponsors that want new types of engagements with these audiences,” Semafor founder Justin B. Smith told Colin Morrison. “It’s not a locked up monopoly market. It’s a very disrupted market.”
“The changes that everyone’s experiencing are so profound, and that just creates tons of opportunity for new innovative players to come in and provide something different that’s user driven and smart.”
Professor Lucy Küng thinks that the next couple of years are pivotal for publishers, but it’s not a time to hunker down: “It’s really time to be bold, but smart. Make big bets, but do the research first. Don’t just make the big bets.”
The importance of brands…and people
As the volume of AI-generated content grows, there has been concern from the industry that publisher content will simply get lost in the tsunami. But many of the speakers at FIPP Congress are seeing this as a reason to double down on the human aspect of their work.
The Economist is taking a ‘3D approach’, focused on differentiation, direct relationships, and discoverability. “We’re leaning into that premium, artisanal nature of our journalism,” Bradley Jones said, talking about their new Economist Insider launch. “We wanted to create something which is unique and can’t be replicated or served by an AI aggregator.”
Semafor’s Justin Smith sees their investment in quality journalism as a core pillar of the brand, and a reason for their rapid success. “It’s attracting the very discerning audience that we care about, which is CEOs and C-suite executives,” he illustrated. “Three years in, 475 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are readers… The engagement is incredibly high.”
The Atlantic’s Chief Growth Officer Megha Garibaldi also took to the stage to talk about the publication’s subscription success. It launched a paywall in 2019 and now has 1.4 million subscribers paying upwards of $80 a year.
“In the age of AI where readers want to connect with a writer, they want to feel closer to the writer and to understand the power that they bring,” Garibaldi told Natasha Christie-Miller, outlining the publication’s mission. “It’s long form journalism, it’s deep reporting analysis, thoughts, opinions, ideas… There has to be excellent journalism, there has to be wonderful writing, and there has to be principles that will not be shaken.”
Paradoxically, despite the number of speakers highlighting the power of brand in building resilience to AI disruption, there was also some lively discussion about the power of individual personalities and creators.
Lucy Küng and Jacob Donnelly pointed out on the Creator Economy panel that traditional media companies are bloated as institutions, and that prevents the ability to be fully profitable. That’s not to say it’s all rosy for creators. They face similar challenges with owning their audience relationships and building followings on rented land.
“Audience attention is very much on creators primarily because they’re creating content that people actually want to consume,” Donnelly emphasised. “Many publishers who got very addicted to traffic over the last 15 years stopped creating content for people. They created content for machines and Google and whatever they wanted and got very addicted to high quantities of traffic, whereas influencers, by and large, have a direct one-to-one connection or somewhat of a parasocial connection to their audience, which has made it possible for people to feel a much tighter connect to what the content is.”
The Atlantic has recently added the ability to follow individual writers. And although The Economist maintains its collective ‘voice’ in its core written products; it has no bylines. However, other products like podcasts and video give audiences an opportunity to connect directly.
“You get to hear and see and meet the journalists and really start to understand the different characters,” Bradley-Jones noted. “These are personalities who now have followings, people who are tuning into them on a weekly basis to listen or see what they have to say.”
In a scotch-fuelled session, Ricky Sutton, Founder and Podcast Host at Future Media and Chris Duncan, Founder and CEO at Seedelta made some predictions for the coming year.
“There’s got to be a massive talent development program in all publishers,” predicted Duncan. “If we are going to make the argument that we are a human media compared to machine media and synthetic media, you will not be able to do that if you’re sitting behind a brand masthead as your depiction of a human being.”
“If you look at the people who are cutting through at the moment, it’s people who are putting human talent…they recognise people that are prepared to explain, people that are prepared to take the extra time to reach out to other sides of opinion and explain why that happens. There’s an opportunity for publishers to really make their talent famous.”
AI to enhance, not replace
Artificial intelligence has been a theme throughout FIPP Congress, but often on practical terms. Publishers have spoken about the challenges they’ve faced over the past few years, but also encouragingly about the ways they are harnessing it.
A common theme, articulated in a video from TIME, was: “Don’t let AI happen to you. Let AI happen for you.” Speakers outlined how they had used AI to enhance, summarise and translate content to increase engagement and reach.
On a panel exploring AI in action, The Atlantic’s Megha Garibaldi was firm that the magazine is “about humans, for humans, and by humans.” The publisher is, however, using AI on an operational level to identify archive pieces, target and segment, and on their paywall. They even have a microsite called the Atlantic Labs which she described as a “playground” to test AI ideas.
Testing was a common experience on the panel. Maureen Hoch, Editor at Harvard Business Review said that they’re exploring AI licensing and its use in coverage, but are also looking at a technology level themselves. “We’re always trying to test tools and determine which ones are going to be the best fit for our editors, our producers, for all the different people that go into making our content, but also what are the experiences that are going to be most valuable for our subscribers,” she said.
Juan Señor, President at INNOVATION Media Consulting issued some sobering reminders when delivering key findings from his annual Innovation in Media 2025 report. “I think the best way to describe AI in the newsroom today is the intern who never sleeps, but who needs constant supervision,” he said, noting that although it does wonderful things, it can be wrong and always needs human oversight.
“As we move firmly into this AI age, everything is at stake… It’s going to be an existential moment,” he concluded.
A special podcast rounding up all the key highlights from FIPP Congress 2025 will be live on Monday 27th October. Follow ‘The Publisher Podcast’ wherever you listen to podcasts, or get a reminder to listen by subscribing to The Publisher Newsletter.
