Media Briefing: What to expect at the Digiday Publishing Summit, March 2026 edition 

This week’s Media Briefing covers what to expect from Digiday’s Publishing Summit in Vail, Colo., next week, with publishers strategizing for the AI era and revealing their biggest hurdles in developing creator networks.

• BuzzFeed’s rocky future
Axios layoffs

Navigating AI licensing, bot-blocking and creator strategies

Where better to unpack the media industry’s biggest challenges than atop a mountain in Vail, where the air is thin and the conversations are anything but. 

Publishing execs will gather at Digiday’s Publishing Summit in Vail, Colo. next week, Mar. 23-35. And they’ll arrive with plenty to unpack — comparing notes, troubleshooting challenges and working through the industry’s biggest AI-era questions.

Execs from The Atlantic, Arena Group, Bloomberg, Business Insider, The Guardian, New York Post, People Inc., Washington Post, and more, will take the stage to share their strategies on everything from zero-click audience strategy, to AI licensing deals and RAG readiness, to how they’re embracing creator strategies to help boost engagement with younger audiences. 

As usual, the town halls will offer a cathartic moment for publishers to aid their toughest challenges and concerns under Chatham House rules (insights can be reported, but nothing attributed to any individual.) 

Next week, there will be more in-depth recaps of what was said onstage and behind closed doors. For now, the summit’s co-hosts, Digiday’s Sara Jerde, Tim Peterson and Sara Guaglione have shared a sneak peek of what to expect from their sessions below. 

Navigating AI licensing and revenue shifts amid referral declines

Eric Aledort, svp, partnerships and business development at The Arena Group will highlight the lack of transparency in AI content licensing deals between big platforms and publishers, and the widening gap between large and smaller publishers as they struggle to negotiate — or even access — AI licensing deals to recoup lost revenue.

Aledort will discuss how his role has evolved to navigate all the AI content marketplaces and deals being offered to publishers. And he’ll delve into how the company – once heavily reliant on search traffic – is diversifying and adapting its revenue structure amid industrywide referral traffic declines.

Jon Roberts, chief Innovation officer at People Inc, and Mark Howard, COO at Time, will share their perspectives on the many AI content licensing marketplaces cropping up. They’ll walk through which tech companies they are in conversations with, why they’ve signed on to join certain marketplaces, and how they’re weeding out the viable options for publishers to make real money in the AI era, from the hype.

Roberts will also discuss the increase in unauthorized bot traffic scraping People Inc.’s content, and what defensive actions publishers need to take to protect their content. He will also explain how People Inc. is using AI internally to improve revenue generation from its contextual ad platform D/Cipher.

And Howard will give details on a new GEO product Time is selling to brands to improve their AI visibility, and how this could develop into a new revenue stream by monetizing their AI insights.

– Sara Guaglione

Tiered AI bot-blocking strategies and newsroom chatbots

Publishers cannot allow AI bot crawlers to run rampant across their sites, but they also can’t afford to become invisible in AI chatbots either. Instead, they need to adopt a strategy for deciding what restrictions to put on AI bots, as The Atlantic has.

The news publisher’s svp of business development and strategic partnerships Mary Liz McCurdy will outline The Atlantic’s three categories of bot permissions: allow, block and an in-between “yes, but” tier. She will also walk through the decision-making framework that The Atlantic’s leadership team has adopted for determining which bots to assign to which permission categories, including how often those decisions are revisited.

Plenty of publishers are putting AI chatbots on their sites. Not The Guardian. On stage at DPS, the British news publisher’s head of editorial innovation will show off The Guardian’s first reader-facing AI feature, but again, it isn’t a chatbot.

No spoilers, but Moran will also discuss how The Guardian enlisted editors from its newsroom to help train the non-chatbot AI feature. He will also talk about the mandatory training program that The Guardian is rolling out across the entire organization this year to educate employees on the capabilities and limitations of AI tools.

– Tim Peterson

Publishers use AI to build new brands and scale personalization

Ariscielle Novicio, CTO and svp of product and digital at New York Post, will discuss how AI has been ingrained in operational workflows after the company created a new newspaper in California earlier this year, called The California Post. Novicio will address how staffers at the new brand were provided a roadmap for AI use — and how early findings are being incorporated into the “mothership.”

Publishers are contending with how to use AI to personalize at scale. Newsweek is working on a solution to boost its membership program by providing personalized homepages to subscribers. Gina Matsumoto, svp, product at Newsweek, will share early findings after beta testing that homepage under Newsweek’s partnership with Google Cloud. 

– Sara Jerde

Competing with influencer agencies for creator-driven ad spend

As publishers pitch their creator networks to brands, they run into one challenge: all the other influencer agencies brands are being pitched too.

Future is among the publishers contending with this challenge. The media company’s vp of creator and community Rachel Zeilic will explain how Future answers that challenge. She’ll also discuss Future’s decision to rebrand its creator division and expand fashion and beauty creators to also cover gaming and tech.

Journalists are ultimately another category of content creator, and with independent creators becoming media outlets in their own right, news organizations need to learn how to work with creators.

Caliber CEO Ramin Beheshti will discuss how the three-year-old media company has built a news organization that embraces creators. That spans work with independent and in-house creators, from editorial production to branded projects. Beheshti will dig into how Caliber picks creators to work with and how it strikes a balance between editorial standards and creators’ creative independence.

Meanwhile, the debate over what term — creator or influencer — is best to describe the growing creator economy has been an ongoing industry question (and one Digiday recently tackled). That conversation is expected to continue at DPS with Allison Murphy, chief operating officer at Axios, who will speak on how the business is relying on expertise to drive coverage.

With products built around that expertise — from event programming tied to certain reporters to local newsletters in dozens of cities — Murphy will divulge a strategy that has worked for the digital media publication.

– Tim Peterson and Sara Jerde

What we’ve heard:

“We want to make sure that we’re continuing to live up to that promise of trust – that trust the publishers are placing in us with all the work we’ve been doing to protect them against AI crawling.”

– James Smith, senior director of product, Cloudflare. 

Numbers to know:

• 17%: The year-over-year drop in total revenue BuzzFeed reported from its 2024 earnings, which took the total to $189.9 million in 2024 (down from $252.68 million in 2023). 
• 100,000: the number of articles Encyclopedia Britannica claims have been unlawfully copied by OpenAI to train its GPT models. 
• $550 million: the amount of compensation David Zaslav will receive from the Warner Bros.-Paramount Merger.
• 180 million: Yahoo’s monthly unique users.
• $500 million: The amount L.A. Times owner Soon-Shiong wants to raise ahead of a public offering in 2027.
• 11: number of editorial staffers laid off at Axios. 

What we’ve covered:

Cloudflare’s push to create an AI content market spotlights tensions

• Cloudflare is pushing to create a market for licensed AI content, offering a compliant crawler aimed at giving publishers more control and reducing inefficient site crawls.
• While Cloudflare emphasizes responsible access and compliance, some industry observers note that the tool’s launch underscores a fundamental tension: intermediaries can create efficiency and monetization opportunities, but they also concentrate control, which may make publishers wary.
  

Read more here.

Connecting brands and creators for ‘flat-fee’ campaigns

• Creator commerce platform LTK wants to solve brand deal bottlenecks by allowing brands to launch flat-fee campaigns that creators can opt in to as they see fit.
• LTK claims to reach 44 million customers shopping monthly and spending over $6 billion annually — in addition to access to 400,000 creators and 8,000 retailers.

Read more here.

What creators learned from Instagram’s automated Shop the Look test

• Instagram Shop the Look test snaffle showed creators the platform isn’t ready for automated product tagging. 
• Creators were reminded of the importance of maintaining control over their content amid the rise of AI-automated tool glitches.

Read more here. 

A new studio is betting Hollywood talent and first-party data will reshape creator monetization

• Linden Lane Films, is one company, among others, pairing Hollywood talent with top creators and building the ad-tech data layer beneath them to compete for brand budgets that have historically gone to premium publishers and platforms like YouTube. 

Read more here. 

In graphic detail: Middle-tier creators are fueling the next phase of the creator economy

• As top creators turn into celebrities commanding six-figure brand deals, a growing middle tier of creators is building sustainable businesses.
• But even though these creators make up an increasingly large slice of the creator economy pie, many say they aren’t getting compensated accordingly.

Read more here.

What we’re reading:

BuzzFeed is deeply in the red
BuzzFeed said it doesn’t have enough resources to meet its cash obligations over the next year without a plan to secure additional capital.

CBS News 24/7 staffers begin bicoastal walkouts
Its 60-member unionized staff began a 24-hour walkout this week on the grounds that management refused to offer a new contract with fair wages and essential work protections.

Axios latest publisher to suffer layoffs
Axios has laid off 11 newsroom staffers as it pivots to seeking “subject matter experts.”

Schibsted open-sources an AI tool that turns news articles into videos
Schibsted is open-sourcing its AI tool Videofy, which can turn text articles into ready-to-publish news videos in minutes, making it available to developers and media organizations worldwide.

Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI for copyright infringement
Encyclopedia Britannica and its Merriam-Webster subsidiary have sued OpenAI for allegedly misusing their reference materials to train its LLM.