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

What to expect at DPS

When not holding a cocktail underneath swaying palm trees or taking a cool dip in the pool by the ocean, publishing execs will compare strategies, trade insights and confront shared challenges at the three-day Digiday Publishing Summit – all to figure out what comes next for publishing in the AI era.

Many of those challenges are existential. Audiences are increasingly getting information from AI-generated summaries and video feeds. Bots are scraping more publisher content, often without reciprocal compensation. Media companies are being forced to rethink how they reach audiences and make money. 

Publishing execs will share how they’re adapting their businesses, as the old playbook loses its grip. The town halls will offer a cathartic platform for publishers to air their wins and their grievances under Chatham House rules (insights can be reported, but all are anonymously sourced).

We’ll offer more in-depth recaps of what was said onstage and behind closed doors in the coming weeks. For now, here’s a sneak peek of what to expect – for those attending, and for those we’ll miss – below. 

Rebuilding the publishing model

The conversations onstage and off will carry forward what was discussed at the last Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail in March: publishers are redefining revenue in the AI era, through a mixture of subscriptions, AI content licensing, video production, and ad revenue operations. They’re determining how to reach their audiences beyond search, through video platforms, AI answer engines and product improvements, as AI reshapes how content is created, discovered and consumed.

Expect “GEO” and “AI visibility” to be buzzwords at the summit. In Vail, Time’s chief operating officer Mark Howard outlined how the publisher was pitching its GEO insights and AI visibility to brands. 

At this month’s event, execs will explain how this area has evolved. Jacquelyn Cameron, CRO at Axios, will discuss onstage exploring new business opportunities to leverage AI visibility, such as through brand partnerships. Mike Peralta, CRO at Future, will unpack the strategies the publisher is using to stay visible in AI search engines, and how to capitalize on this while also trying to snag more AI licensing deals.

Redefining publisher revenue

As the economics of traffic and scale shift (and traffic-based monetization becomes less dependable), publishers are building a more diversified revenue mix spanning subscriptions, licensing, advertising and partnerships.

Phil Andraos, gm for digital at Reuters, will detail how the publisher is delicately balancing its push into a subscription business while continuing to grow its robust advertising business. Kristin Roberts, president of USA Today Media, will discuss where the company sees investment opportunities, ranging from AI product development to subscription offerings.

The old publishing model was built around scale: more traffic meant more impressions, which meant more ad revenue. But Reuters is betting that equation is changing. Attracting high-quality users, building direct relationships with them and using first-party data to make those audiences more valuable — both as potential subscribers and to advertisers – creates a model where subscriptions and advertising don’t have to compete for the same audience. A growing base of logged-in, highly engaged subscribers can strengthen both sides of the business, Andraos said in a recent interview.

Adam Greenberg, vp of strategic partnerships at The New York Times, will level set on the current AI licensing landscape, addressing where the momentum is (and isn’t) and how he’s weeding out the real revenue opportunities from the ones still in a nascent stage. Publishers shouldn’t assume that today’s AI business models are inevitable — or chase licensing dollars at the expense of their core businesses, he told Digiday.

“The dollars and cents aren’t very good right now for most — even those that got deals. It’ll be very interesting to see… what happens with all these early deals and renewals and how those models shift,” Greenberg said.

Rewiring audience growth and distribution

With search referrals under pressure and audiences increasingly fragmented, publishers are finding new ways to reach people, build habits and deepen direct relationships. Expect another big topic of conversation at DPS to be around “Google Zero,” and what may push publishers to finally block Google’s crawlers and risk losing valuable search traffic.

“The arrangement that governed the web that everybody was OK with… the quid pro quo that we will let you crawl our site and in return you give us traffic? That has greatly changed and no one had a conversation about it [first],” said Steve Horowitz, president of Ziff Davis’ tech & shopping business.

In his onstage session, Horowitz will share the publisher’s playbook for lessening its reliance on Google search traffic. He’ll outline how investments in video, social and newsletters have helped create new paths to growth and monetization.

Francesca Barber, Politico’s evp of product, audience and AI, will preview a new product rolling out this fall for both free and paid audiences to build loyalty and habitual behavior.

And Taneth Evans, head of digital at The Wall Street Journal, will talk onstage about the publisher’s push to produce more reporter-led video, social, audio and newsletters, and how this has helped reach new audiences, deepen engagement and drive subscriptions and revenue across its own platforms.

What we’ve heard

“It’s more than just ‘the publisher can’t opt out,’ and I think that’s critical to the plaintiff arguments from Penske and Chegg. It’s actually anti‑competitive against this nascent emerging AI market because the publishers can opt out of all these other [AI] companies, and they’re going to have to pay to license the content, and Google doesn’t have to because the publishers can’t opt out, and they just force the rights into the bundle.”
– Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, on why the Penske v. Google goes beyond opt-outs.

Numbers to know

3 out of 10: guest op-eds submitted to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times, were labeled as at least 80%, per AI detector Pangram.

85,000: The number of subscribers The Onion currently has.

$2 million: The amount of annual recurring revenue ghost creator platform Virelox made last year.

60: The number of podcasts Netflix now has available on its platform. 

What we’ve covered

Why brands are turning to older creators for authenticity AI can’t fake

• Millennial and Gen X creators bring mortgages, burnout, parenting, health scares, and mid-career pivots into their feeds: real-life problems that are hard to fake and increasingly valuable to brands looking for credibility with older, higher-spending audiences. 
• Brands are noticing, and responding by building actual long-term relationships instead of one-off campaigns.

Read more here. 

How every major platform pays creators

• Every major social platform now runs its own creator payout scheme, each with markedly different rules, structures and eligibility requirements.
• Here’s a breakdown of the monetization rules and requirements for Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, X, Facebook, and Snap.

Read more here. 

Creator industry admits that fee pricing is out of control, but can’t agree on a fix

• Half of marketers misprice creator fees and 40% of them believe they overpaid, per 1,000 marketing and procurement leaders surveyed by Billion Dollar Boy.
• Brands pay too much 90% of the time, which is creating an expectation problem, according to agency sources.

Read more here. 

The Telegraph’s next podcast play: video, events and paid memberships

• Fresh off its acquisition by Axel Springer, The Telegraph is pushing its podcast ambitions beyond audio. 
• The publisher is building repeatable franchises that can span video, live events and paid membership, to further deepen direct relationships with audiences.

Read more here. 

The case for and against the ‘programmatic-ification’ of the creator economy

• Marketers have been trying to get influencer and creator marketing down to a science. There’s an efficiency play in these AI dashboards, agencies say. 
• On the flip side: As marketers hand over more of the influencer and creator marketing playbook to automated tools, they run the risk of recreating programmatic’s pitfalls. 

Read more here. 

What we’re reading

Saturday Evening Post to close print magazine after 205 years

The Saturday Evening Post, which has long chronicled American life, will publish its final print issue in January. President and publisher Joan SerVaas told the magazine’s 50,000 subscribers this was due to rising production costs, declining ad revenue and shifting reader habits.

Axel Springer moves into Middle Eastern tech and business market via acquisition

Axel Springer has acquired The Circuit, an Abu Dhabi-based publication focused on tech and business in the region, where political instability, oil money and fast-rising tech, finance and entertainment industries are playing an ever bigger role in shaping the global narratives. 

Hollywood studios have sued over AI. Now Google is courting them to use its tools

Google has been in talks with Disney, Universal, Warner Bros., Discovery and other studios about licensing their characters and film catalogs for its AI products, though thorny legal issues have slowed progress. No deals have been inked yet.

The Society of Professional Journalists proposes edits to its code of ethics for the AI age

The SPJ has proposed new revisions to its code of ethics for the first time in 12 years, to cater for how news consumption is evolving.