This article is based on a talk the author delivered at DW Akademie’s event "The next chapter: Journalism in the age of AI," in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in November 2025.

It probably won't boost my career, but it's time to be blunt: If most people in the news ecosystem continue to believe that the main battle to sustain journalism is fighting Big Tech for compensation over content used to train AI models, they're headed down a dead end.

Not because they're wrong in principle. Not because it isn't a fair fight. There's no doubt that AI is capturing value from the entire knowledge economy, and journalism is part of that. Having a financial redistribution mechanism in place is a matter of fairness, and regulation is needed. But this is more a matter of principle than survival.

With or without the fight for fair compensation, a reality check in the media industry is long overdue. Even in the best-case scenario:

1. Revenues squeezed out of platforms will never generate enough money to protect public interest journalism long-term,
2. News organizations are too divided to share the money in ways that ensure diversity rather than consolidating incumbents,
3. This approach misses the forest for the trees.

The main battle should be about rebuilding trust, putting audiences at the center, and embracing technology to offer new experiences and forms of engagement in order to remain essential actors in today's reality. Only then will "real money" follow and newsroom integrity be secured (at least for some).

To understand what's happening now, we need to step back and provide context —which is what journalists should do, isn't it?

Did Big Tech really destroy media's business model?

The short answer is yes, because revenue has dramatically shifted from news publishers to platform marketplaces. The harder question is whether it was intentional. Did Google and others deliberately divert publishers' revenue and kill journalism? Probably not.

Big Tech is partly responsible and should help fix the problem, but a few myths need to be cleared up first. If we've ended up in this situation, it's primarily because nature abhors a vacuum. In the early days of internet disruption, most news publishers shared a similar attitude: Protectionism of the old business model — especially print and advertising revenue — took precedence over creating fundamentally new ecosystems and reshaping relationships with audiences.

So what actually happened was that rather than building reader revenue models very early on, most news organizations gave their content to Google for free (as a matter of fact, publishers always controlled their robots.txt files, but who in a newsroom even knew what a robots.txt file was?)

• Rather than building coalitions and consolidating the ad market while offering high-quality, data-driven marketplaces, they let new players like Craigslist and Google capture their advertising revenue.
• Rather than implementing paywalls from day one or creating completely new experiences for readers and advertisers, most continued believing that magic would save them. A Guardian's January 2010 headlineperfectly captured this wishful thinking: "Can the Apple iPad save newspapers?"
• Rather than helping build a vibrant, diverse news landscape by promoting new players and taking a unified approach to creating ecosystem value for all, many incumbents made one-on-one deals with big tech and promoted regulations serving their own business interests rather than defending journalism as a democratic necessity.
• Rather than embracing technology in a world of code, everyone tried to compete, reinvent the wheel, and desperately listened to noise instead of signals from the tech-savvy few who tried paving the way for new models — like voices crying out in the desert.

Looking back to the last 15 years, history shows that organizations making early bets on diversified reader revenue models, tech-savvy approaches, and investments in expertise, investigation, and high-value journalism — with engagement and audience at the core of the user experience — are today's winners.

Lessons from inside Big Tech

As the global Head of Innovation in charge of the news ecosystem at Google, I led probably one of the biggest initiatives ever launched to stimulate the news ecosystem, distributing approximately $500 million over eight years.

Five things kept striking me:

1. Insane tech overlap
All news organizations need the same building blocks: CMS, CRM, paywall/donations, e-reader, print integration, email builder/sender, AI assistant, etc. Yet everyone reinvents the wheel. In a struggling industry, that's nonsensical — especially for small and medium, often so called, independent publishers.

2. No truly holistic, off-the-shelf stack
We talked for years about an off-the-shelf tech stack for independent players. Very few have tackled it end-to-end. Most tech stacks I see are Frankenstein monsters — stitched-together tools that limit segmentation, data consolidation, and efficiency.

3. "Being a tech company" isn't realistic for most
Some news organizations are tech companies. That's the exception. For most, it's not an option. Competition in the newsroom should happen around content. Being tech-savvy requires a range of skills and a level of investment that only a few can afford or have the mindset for.

4. Donors act in silos with no impact measurement
Acting as philanthropists to promote ecosystem diversity with the best intentions, donors created illusions. They very often operated on a "more is better" principle rather than focusing on impactful initiatives that could truly pave the way for market success by doubling down on investments based on potential, not vague editorial and business growth promises. Even worse, donors compete with each other and duplicate existing efforts rather than unifying their strength and strategy.

5. Independent players learned to follow the money rather than build foundational models
As a consequence of most of the donors' approach, survival mechanisms prompted independent players to become rockstars at pitching new projects to get funding, rather than focusing on building sustainable day-to-day business models. This only increased donor dependency. It’s an illusion to believe that anyone will save the news industry except itself — by reinventing itself, being self-critical, and collaborating.

A wake-up call

Recently, I made a career shift and became a partner in a tech company creating the tech stack many independent players claimed to dream of — and that key figures in the donor world said was massively needed to reduce costs and focus on what matters most: Producing and distributing journalism. The challenges I’m facing now clarified one thing even more: While technology is probably the most important component of the new world we're living in, having deep, thorough tech conversations in this ecosystem is very very hard. Donors don't want them. News organizations rarely make them a priority and want something that "just works" without understanding that improvement comes from collaborative efforts to tackle technological hurdles. And most industry event organizers find these conversations boring.

The real path forward

Returning to the initial question about fair compensation for public-interest journalism: There's no doubt that AI is capturing value from the entire knowledge economy, and journalism is part of that. Having a financial distribution mechanism in place is a matter of fairness, and regulation is needed. But this is more a matter of principle than survival.
By the way, having unified tools to watermark, track content and build tech coalitions is key when it comes to building new sets of products designed to promote and protect journalism in the agentic era or even engaging negotiation and/or lawsuits as/when needed.

To survive — and examples worldwide show it works, especially if as a publisher you’re ready to acknowledge that you should be inspired by the recipes of niche businesses  — three things are needed to build trust that is at the heart of every successful model: Investment in journalism, building real tech joint initiatives, and putting the reader at the centre.

Ludovic Blecher is an internationally recognized leader in media innovation and digital transformation. Partner at WhiteBeard, a MENA-based technology company, and Founder of the advisory firm IDation, he helps news organizations reimagine the future of storytelling, sustainability, and growth. Blecher spent 10 years at Google, where he led the Global Innovation and Funding Strategy for the News Ecosystem and co-founded the Google News Initiative.