Disruption? You ain’t seen nothing

2026 will make the last tumultuous decades in journalism look tranquil by comparison.

Layered atop the strata of technological, economic and consumer consumption transformations that have challenged both the business and the practice of journalism, the second year of Donald Trump’s second term and the acceleration of the proliferation, adoption, and distribution of AI “slop” will act as twin catalysts of disruption. As a result, news organizations will have to move even more aggressively to build strong direct relationships with their customers. The strategy will be different for each, depending on their legacy, their competitive advantages and the opportunities their business and editorial leaders can identify and grasp.

The successful will put product thinking at the center of their effort. While journalism has always been driven by the desire to inform the public, identifying and fulfilling precise user needs beyond the general “right to know” has rarely been at the heart of the enterprise. It will be in 2026. More and more journalists will come to view “audience” (and remember how hard it was for many newsrooms to even embrace that concept initially) as a connected community whose needs, desires, and predilections will not replace journalistic judgment but will, increasingly, inform it.

Politically, 2026 could be an historic inflection point. In all likelihood, it will be. But if our politics of the last two decades have taught us anything, it is that our understanding of the possible, tethered to precedent, is worth exactly bupkis.

2026 may be the year that President Trump’s autocratic experiment enters a new phase of previously unimaginable executive excesses and erosions of American freedoms, or it could be the year that the institutions and individuals with the courage and wherewithal to confront the President’s (and the Court’s) view of expansive presidential powers roars back. Or it could be something else altogether. As we used to say at print newsweeklies: Time will tell.

How much Donald Trump’s second administration is irrevocably changing America — our laws, our norms, our policy, our polity — and our position in the world is unknowable nearly a year in. What is certain is that Trump 2.0 will have a lasting impact on the news and information ecosystem, from its political hue and spectrum to its corporate owners.

But Trump, depending on how his story ends, could end up being less seismic than forces that are far more far-reaching than the American presidency. Because of the continuing democratization of news and information gathering — younger audiences’ questioning of legacy media and our once-assumed authority, older audiences’ distrust of us, stoked by those in power who gain from our weakness — and the proliferation of AI slop like the world has never seen, trust will be the most valuable commodity we have. At the same time, media leaders will find it increasingly difficult to make “commodity news” the center of a successful journalistic enterprise. If audiences can get what you provide elsewhere for free, they will get it there. They must believe that what you provide adds value to them.

The secret sauce of organizations and businesses that have best managed the transformation so far has been understanding their audiences and their needs. It wasn’t that The New York Times decided at the dawn of the digital age that games and food would strengthen their business; it was developing an audience research discipline that was deeply connected to the newsroom and content production. The number of starts and stops and deprecated experiments and full-on products is largely forgotten now, but the Times’s road to subscriber success is littered with them. Necessarily. Including a few that I led. Testing and learning, and sometimes failing, are key to digital innovation and eventual success. Success for each news organization will be tied to the competitive advantages they can identify, master and exploit.

Community will increasingly replace audience as the driver of engagement, something digital content creators and influencers have long understood. And something local print newspapers knew long ago. Even though the roots of news judgment were usually planted in deeply well-meaning ground, the old business model nurtured a certain arrogance: we’ll tell you what you need to know, and you’ll like it. As the world transformed from a producer-push environment to a consumer-pull environment, we lost that one-way hegemony.

Now, digitally native and legacy organizations alike will work to find, engage and expand their community. That won’t always be in the news space, though news may be the central organizing principle — kind of the way that scholarly advancement is the central mission of the university, but universities are comprised of and provide so much more than pioneering scholarship.

As a result, journalists should not feel shy about advocating for the audience’s needs. And that means every journalist, from the intern, the PA, or the AP, on up. Leaders often say that the best ideas can come from anywhere in the newsroom, especially when they’re discussing innovation and experimentation, but rarely do they empower everyone in the newsroom to contribute. If we are to survive and thrive, allowing everyone to contribute must become part of the organizational culture, at least as much as hierarchy is.

But emphasizing community will not be enough. News organizations must understand what community means for their audience. Not just what our viewers, listeners, and readers want to get from us, but what drives them in their lives and their aspirations, and what part of it we have a competitive edge to deliver.

This is not traditionally a part of journalism training. This is not who, what, when, where, why and how. Those are so fundamentally a part of news that Mrs. Yannick taught them to us at P.S. 40 in New York City in the second grade a half century ago! Media and technology today are almost unrecognizable from then: we rely on an array of modern tools to answer those questions. Why wouldn’t we rely on advances in technology to transform our businesses too?