Media Briefing: Publishers are rebuilding their newsrooms for the post-Google era

Publishers spent much of this year bracing for a world with fewer Google search referrals. Now, as fall approaches, they’re not just tweaking SEO strategies; they’re rewriting org charts, redefining audience teams and creating new AI-focused roles to survive a “Google Zero” future.

Recent moves at USA Today Co. and The New York Times show how these strategies are moving from theory into practice. 

Monica Richardson, svp at USA Today, announced last week that the company was forming a new audience and digital production team as a result of the changing search environment — and it would lead to some layoffs, according to an internal staff memo obtained by The New York Times reporter Ben Mullin.

“Growing audience by producing more content isn’t as effective as it once was. Search traffic is under pressure, and platforms are increasingly keeping user experiences to themselves instead of sending them back to us. Our current structure was built for a different media landscape. We need to change how we’re organized to strategically compete in this moment,” Richardson wrote.

The new structure will focus on centralized production, audience growth within key coverage areas and off-platform distribution, according to the memo. The company’s Q2 earnings showed total revenues decreased 8.3% year-over-year, and digital advertising revenue decreased 9.2%, due in part to lower page views. 

Lark-Marie Antón, a USA Today Co. spokesperson, declined to answer questions about how many people would be affected and noted that the company would “continue adapting our business to evolving audience behaviors, changing market dynamics, and advances in technology.”

USA Today Co. is hiring an executive editor of audience and digital production to oversee the new team, as well as several new audience positions, according to Richardson’s memo. The goal is to have a new team in place within the next six to eight weeks, she added. The executive editor job listing notes the team will include between 23 to 30 people.

Meanwhile, Christine Liang announced on LinkedIn last week that she was stepping into a new role at The New York Times overseeing AI and off-platform discovery, after seven years leading technical SEO at the Times. It’s a sign that the Times is placing a bigger bet on the importance of navigating AI platforms — and the growing audience of AI bots — to improve content discovery.

“The way we search the internet has changed. So has the way we read. People increasingly get their news through AI-mediated pathways. I’ll focus on making sure our world-class journalism reaches readers — and agents — wherever they are,” she wrote in her post. (The Times declined an interview request with Liang.)

The Washington Post added a similar role in October 2025, when Kyle Sutton (previously senior director of SEO at The Points Guy) became The Post’s first head of SEO and AI discovery.

Rather than abandoning SEO, media companies are rethinking how audience teams are structured, which distribution channels deserve investment and how editorial workflows can serve both human readers and AI systems. The emerging playbook is still taking shape, but the shift is becoming clearer.

Expect more reorganizations, overhauls and new job titles in response to the changing search and AI environment, with a greater focus on off-platform distribution, as publishers work to deepen relationships with audiences. 

“Publishers are putting more effort into disintermediated channels, [such as] direct app installs, email newsletters, habit-forming puzzles, and multimedia content like podcasts and videos. The focus has shifted from chasing clicks to chasing loyalty, with an audience strategy that prioritizes building direct relationships with readers over optimizing for intermediaries like Google and Meta,” said Barry Adams, founder of Polemic Digital, an SEO and audience growth consultancy for news publishers. “The drastic loss of Google traffic to the AI-pocalypse has finally forced publishers to take their audience seriously.”

There’s also a business incentive here: more publishers are pitching AI visibility insights and GEO products to clients as marketers race to improve their standing in AI answer engines and publishers seek new revenue lines. 

“With reduced traffic volumes from search engine referrals and typically declining organic traffic, becoming more cost efficient is a priority,” said Ameet Shah, partner and global svp of publisher operations and tech strategy at Prohaska Consulting. “Finding ways to incorporate AI to improve analytics, workflows… to improve response times, audience understanding, and running leaner teams. There will be less focus on using AI for content generation as that becomes a commodity and lowers the unique value of the publisher,” he said. 

AI lawsuits and licensing agreements will also continue to progress through the end of the year, as publishers seek new revenue from their content getting scraped by AI systems, while courts weigh whether AI companies’ use of copyrighted material constitutes fair use. It’s a question that could reshape the industry’s negotiating leverage and the economics of AI content deals. The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit last week against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement.

That lawsuit can be added to the growing list of legal actions taken by publishers against OpenAI and other AI companies. But Jason Kint, CEO of publisher trade group Digital Content Next, said the court case to watch is the lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft. Last week, the Justice Department backed OpenAI’s fair-use defense — and while this doesn’t directly impact the judge’s decision on the court case, it does raise the stakes and gives the AI company a powerful new ally.

But there will also be more opportunities for AI content licensing agreements this year. 

“For the first time, I’m seeing many in our industry create the scarcity that’s needed to increase value to those they do intend to reach,” said Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the trade organization News/Media Alliance. “The massive scraping and reselling of content is being addressed through third parties like Cloudflare and TollBit who want to help, our bad bots legislation, and tons of litigation in the space. I think they’re seeing the horizon where licensing and intentional delivery can pay off,” she added. 

What we’ve heard

“We are speaking with folks there with some frequency, but none have committed to adopting the framework as yet. We’ve had good signals that the events and the underlying concepts align with how these systems operate and a stable [version one] allows for conversations about [proof] of concepts to start moving forwards.”

— Alex Springer, technical lead for the SPUR Coalition, on engaging with Google, Meta and OpenAI about the new standard they’re creating to track how AI systems access publishers’ content.

Numbers to know

300,000: The number of individual subscriptions The Washington Post has sold, a company spokesperson told Digiday.

53%: The year-over-year increase in The Washington Post’s programmatic ad revenue.

32.8 million: The number of Condé Nast user records in a database being sold on a Russian-language, cybercrime forum, according to Ransomnews.

What we’ve covered

WTF is a ghost creator?

• There’s an army of people making content based solely on briefs. These “ghost creators,” or creators-as-a-service, are suddenly under the spotlight, but some marketers have actually been using them for years. 
• Brands might tap ghost creators for cost effective content that hews exactly to their script and can be spun up fast. 

Read more here.

The Amazon-FTC case and the myth of ad auction transparency

• The FTC’s lawsuit alleges that Amazon secretly inflated search ad prices through undisclosed “soft reserve” pricing.
• But agency executives say  opaque auction mechanics have become commonplace across digital advertising, and advertisers have grown accustomed to limited visibility and control.

Read more here.

Marketers face dilemma around rising bot and AI web traffic

• Rising bot and AI traffic is making it harder for marketers to distinguish valuable visitors from bots distorting analytics and wasting ad budgets.
• Agencies are tightening bot filtering and shifting some spending to other platforms, while trying not to block genuine AI-driven customers.

Read more here.

Google divestiture is dead — and publishers are fine with that

• Publishers are divided over Google avoiding an AdX breakup – but many welcome the stability and hope behavioral remedies will improve transparency and interoperability.
• Google’s underlying power remains intact, particularly its control over advertiser demand, while publishers face growing AI pressures and await potentially tougher European remedies.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

Jeff D’Onofrio named Washington Post publisher, CEO

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, announced in an email to staff on Wednesday that The Post’s acting publisher and CEO Jeff D’Onofrio will assume the role permanently. He succeeds William Lewis, who resigned in February. D’Onofrio joined The Post in June 2025 as CFO. 

DOJ sides with OpenAI in New York Times copyright lawsuit

The Justice Department sided with OpenAI in its copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times, arguing that training AI models on copyrighted material is generally fair use, The Times reported.

Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, the latest publications to do so, over the use of their content to train AI, The Verge reported.

YouTube cracks down on ‘ghost creators’

YouTube terminated 20 channels linked to a network of “ghost creators” after Semafor exposed how companies were using paid actors and AI-generated scripts to produce sensationalized political videos, Semafor reported.