Based on the provided transcript of Dmitry Shishkin’s talk, here are the four core arguments he presents for building the newsroom of the future, each elaborated upon in detail.
Introduction
In his address, Dmitry Shishkin, reflecting on his experiences and a paper written for Ringier, outlines a comprehensive framework for the “newsroom of the future.” He argues that in an era of constant disruption—from cultural inertia and audience fragmentation to the omnipresent challenge of AI—news organizations must evolve from being “generalist news providers” to purveyors of “indispensable journalism.” This transition is not a single, monolithic project but a multi-faceted transformation built on four interdependent pillars. These core arguments are:
- The Granularity of Content Strategy: A radical reconceptualization of content away from broad topics and towards a portfolio of highly specific, niche “content propositions.”
- Redefining Audience-Centricity: A fundamental shift from passive, one-way communication to active, early-stage audience participation that shapes the very form and substance of journalism.
- The Proper Role of AI: A strategic positioning of Artificial Intelligence not as a silver bullet, but as a powerful enabling tool that should only be fully leveraged after the foundational issues of content and audience strategy are resolved.
- The Foundational Imperative of Cultural Transformation: The recognition that no strategic, operational, or technological change can succeed without first cultivating a newsroom culture rooted in psychological safety, continuous learning, and rewarded curiosity.
Below is a detailed elaboration on each of these core arguments.
Core Argument 1: The Granularity of Content Strategy – From Generalist to a Federation of Niches
The first and most fundamental argument Shishkin puts forward is a direct assault on the traditional structure of the generalist newsroom. He contends that for a news organization to become “indispensable,” it must abandon the vague notion of covering broad categories like “politics,” “business,” or “sports.” Instead, it must deconstruct these categories into a multitude of highly specific, granular niches and treat each one as a distinct “content proposition” with its own strategy, audience, and goals. He quantifies this by suggesting that a publication with “12, 15, 20 topics” should realistically view itself as managing “60 topics or 80 topics overall.” This is not merely a semantic change; it represents a profound strategic and operational shift from a centralized, factory-line model of content production to a decentralized, portfolio-management approach.
Elaboration:
This argument is a direct response to the economic and attentional realities of the digital age. The “generalist news provider” model was a product of a pre-internet era of information scarcity, where a single newspaper or broadcast could serve as a community’s primary source for a wide array of information. The internet shattered this model by creating infinite choice and empowering specialized creators and publications. A reader interested in climate tech policy no longer needs to sift through a general newspaper’s business section; they can go directly to specialized newsletters, podcasts, and websites that cater exclusively to that interest with greater depth and expertise. Shishkin’s argument is that for a legacy organization to compete, it cannot simply offer a shallow overview of everything. It must create the depth and focus of a niche publication within its own structure, multiple times over.
Treating each of these 60-80 micro-topics as a “content proposition” is the critical operational component of this strategy. A content proposition is far more than just a topic; it is a fully-fledged product-oriented approach to a specific area of coverage. This involves defining several key elements for each niche:
- The Target Audience: Who, precisely, are we serving with this niche? It’s not just “people interested in health.” It is, for example, “new parents in our city navigating the pediatric healthcare system,” or “mid-career professionals seeking evidence-based advice on fitness and longevity.” This level of specificity allows for a much deeper understanding of the audience’s problems, questions, and information needs.
- The Unique Value Proposition (UVP): What makes our coverage of this niche indispensable? Why should this specific audience choose us over a dedicated blogger, a Substack writer, or a larger national publication? The UVP must be explicit. It could be access to unique local data, the unparalleled expertise of a specific journalist, a commitment to a particular angle (e.g., solutions-focused journalism), or a unique voice and tone that resonates with the target community. Without a clear and defensible UVP for each niche, the coverage will remain generic and easily replaceable.
- Formats and Distribution: How does this specific audience prefer to consume information about this topic? The “new parents” niche might be best served by a scannable weekly newsletter, a private Facebook group for community discussion, and short, practical videos. The “longevity-focused professionals” might prefer a deep-dive monthly podcast and data-heavy investigative articles. The strategy dictates that the format and distribution channels must be tailored to the niche, rather than forcing all content into a one-size-fits-all website template. This is what Shishkin alludes to when he mentions the future importance of multimodality connected to user needs.
- Success Metrics: How do we measure success for this content proposition? For a generalist newsroom, the dominant metric is often raw traffic (pageviews). In a niche-based model, the metrics are more sophisticated and aligned with the proposition’s goals. Success for a niche aimed at building community might be the number of active members in its online forum. Success for a niche designed to drive subscriptions might be its direct conversion rate. Success for a public service niche might be measured by evidence of real-world impact or a “days since our last investigation was cited in a government hearing” metric.
Implementing this model requires a monumental structural change. It means moving away from a traditional news desk structure (city desk, sports desk) towards a model of vertical teams or “squads,” where each team is a cross-functional unit responsible for a cluster of related niches. Such a team might include a journalist, an audience editor, a data analyst, and a product manager, all working together to grow and serve the audience for their specific content propositions. This is the essence of Shishkin’s point: “you are transforming 80 content propositions effectively.” The transformation isn’t a single top-down initiative; it is a simultaneous, multifaceted effort happening across the entire organization. This approach is the only way to build true indispensability, because loyalty is no longer commanded by a master brand alone, but earned, niche by niche, by providing unparalleled value to specific communities of interest.
Core Argument 2: Redefining Audience-Centricity – From Passive Consumption to Active Participation
Shishkin’s second argument challenges the industry’s often superficial implementation of “audience-centricity.” While most newsrooms now pay lip service to listening to their audience—primarily through analytics, surveys, and comment sections—he argues this is insufficient. The current model still treats the audience as a passive recipient, a consumer to be understood and marketed to after the journalism has already been created. Shishkin advocates for a more radical form of engagement where the audience is brought into the journalistic process at a much earlier stage, actively influencing not just the topics covered but the very “genres” and formats of the journalism itself. He crystallizes this idea by stating, “participation replaces one with communication,” suggesting a move from a one-way broadcast to a two-way, collaborative relationship.
Elaboration:
This argument moves beyond the concept of audience engagement as a distribution or marketing function and reframes it as a core editorial principle. It is about fundamentally changing the power dynamic between the journalist and the community they serve. The traditional model, often described as “we write, you read,” is built on an assumption of authority where journalists are the sole arbiters of what is newsworthy. Shishkin’s vision is one of co-creation, where the newsroom acts as a facilitator and convener of community knowledge and conversation, in addition to being a provider of information.
This active participation can manifest in numerous ways, transforming the entire journalistic workflow:
- Agenda Setting: Instead of relying solely on internal editorial meetings and institutional sources, the news agenda is directly shaped by community input. This is the principle behind models like the “Citizens Agenda,” popularized by organizations like Hearken and City Bureau. Before an election, journalists don’t just ask politicians their platforms; they spend months asking the community, “What do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for your votes?” The resulting list of public priorities then becomes the core of the election coverage, forcing politicians to address the actual concerns of the people they wish to represent. This transforms coverage from a political horse race into a genuine public service.
- Source Development and Information Gathering: Active participation turns the audience from a collection of eyeballs into a distributed network of sources and experts. When ProPublica investigates predatory billing practices by hospitals, it puts out a call for people to share their medical bills, gathering a dataset of thousands of examples that would be impossible for a handful of reporters to collect on their own. This “crowdsourcing” is not a gimmick; it is a powerful investigative technique that builds trust and transparency by showing the community that their knowledge and experience are valued.
- Influencing Formats and “Genres”: This is perhaps the most forward-thinking part of Shishkin’s argument. He suggests audiences should “influence our genres.” This means going beyond asking what to cover and starting to ask how it should be covered. For example, a community might express that long, text-based articles about complex city budgets are impenetrable. A truly participatory newsroom would work with that community to develop new formats: an interactive budget calculator, a Q&A session with the city treasurer hosted on Zoom, a series of short, explanatory TikTok videos, or even a physical workshop at a local library. This is where Shishkin’s mention of “young audiences” and “creators” becomes critical. These groups are native to new forms of communication and can be invaluable partners in designing journalism that is not only informative but also accessible, engaging, and relevant to their lives.
- Building Community and Loyalty: The ultimate outcome of this shift is the creation of a deeply loyal community that sees the news organization not just as a content provider, but as an essential civic institution that belongs to them. When audience members see their questions answered, their expertise valued, and their concerns shaping the news agenda, their relationship with the organization transforms from a transactional one (paying for a subscription) to a relational one (becoming a member or a supporter). This is the foundation of long-term sustainability. It builds a powerful moat against commoditized, AI-generated news because its value lies in the human relationship, the shared sense of purpose, and the collaborative process—all things that cannot be easily replicated by an algorithm. The newsroom becomes indispensable because it is deeply intertwined with the civic and social fabric of the community it serves.
Core Argument 3: The Proper Role of AI – A Tool for Enhancement, Not a Substitute for Strategy
Shishkin’s third argument addresses the industry’s obsession with Artificial Intelligence, but he does so with a crucial and contrarian note of caution. While acknowledging AI’s importance (“surprise, surprise”), he deliberately de-prioritizes it relative to the foundational work of defining content strategy and building genuine audience participation. His core argument is that AI is a powerful enabler, not a strategy in itself. He warns that newsrooms risk squandering AI’s potential if they rush to adopt it as a solution for efficiency without first fixing their fundamental value proposition. As he states unequivocally, “if this is not right [content and audience strategy], no AI can help you if you don’t really think about why you exist in the first place.”
Elaboration:
This argument positions Shishkin as a pragmatist amidst a sea of hype. He recognizes the danger of “shiny object syndrome,” where news organizations, desperate for a lifeline, might see generative AI as a magic bullet to cut costs and increase output, without considering whether the output is valuable or who it is for. His point is that using AI to more efficiently produce mediocre, generic content is a recipe for accelerating irrelevance. The true strategic value of AI is unlocked only when it is applied in service of the first two, more fundamental arguments.
- AI in Service of Granular Content Strategy: When a newsroom commits to managing 80 distinct “content propositions,” the operational complexity becomes immense. This is where AI can be a transformative enabler.
- Audience Intelligence: AI can analyze vast datasets (on-site behavior, social media trends, search queries) to identify underserved niches and emerging topics of interest within a community, helping to validate which “content propositions” are worth investing in.
- Content Optimization: For each niche, AI tools can assist with headline A/B testing, SEO optimization, and recommending the best formats and distribution times to reach the target audience.
- Content Automation and Versioning: AI can take a single piece of high-value, human-created journalism—like a deep investigative report—and automatically generate multiple versions tailored for different platforms and niches: a series of tweets, a script for a short video, a summary for a newsletter, and a set of key points for a mobile alert. This allows journalists to focus on the core reporting while AI handles the laborious task of adaptation.
- AI in Service of Audience Participation: AI can also be a powerful tool for deepening the relationship with the audience, moving beyond simple analytics.
- Sentiment Analysis: AI can scan thousands of comments, social media mentions, and survey responses to provide editors with a nuanced understanding of community sentiment, identifying key concerns, common questions, and areas of confusion that require further reporting.
- Personalization: For news organizations with a membership or subscription model, AI can help create a more personalized experience, recommending articles, newsletters, and events based on a user’s engagement with specific content niches. This reinforces the feeling that the organization understands and serves their individual needs.
- Managing Community Dialogue: AI-powered moderation tools can help manage online community spaces, filtering out toxic behavior and highlighting constructive contributions, making it easier for journalists to facilitate productive conversations at scale.
- The Efficiency Dividend Reinvested: Shishkin’s argument implies a specific purpose for AI-driven efficiency. The goal of using AI to automate routine tasks—such as transcribing interviews, summarizing press releases, or writing basic earnings reports—is not simply to cut costs by reducing headcount. The strategic goal is to free up human journalists from low-value, repetitive labor so they can reinvest that “efficiency dividend” into the high-value, uniquely human work that builds indispensability: deep investigative reporting, building trust with sources, engaging directly with the community, creative storytelling, and exercising ethical judgment.
In essence, Shishkin is arguing for a “human-in-the-loop” approach where AI augments, rather than replaces, the journalist. AI handles the scale, the data processing, and the repetitive tasks, while humans provide the creativity, the empathy, the critical thinking, and the community connection. Without a clear strategy for what that high-value human work should be (Argument 1 and 2), the efficiency gains from AI are meaningless.
Core Argument 4: The Foundational Imperative of Cultural Transformation
Shishkin’s final and arguably most impassioned argument is that none of the preceding strategic shifts are possible without a profound and deliberate transformation of the newsroom culture itself. He identifies cultural resistance as the ultimate barrier to progress, vividly illustrating it with the anecdote of a journalist who refused to move desks because his plant was “accustomed to this sunlight.” This story serves as a metaphor for a deep-seated fear of change and attachment to legacy workflows. To overcome this, Shishkin proposes a culture built on psychological safety, continuous learning, and active curiosity. This is the foundational layer upon which everything else must be built. A brilliant strategy executed by a resistant or fearful culture is doomed to fail.
Elaboration:
This argument frames transformation not as a project with an endpoint, but as a continuous state of being. The problem with past “digital transformation” initiatives is that they were often imposed top-down, creating fear and resentment among staff who felt they were being judged for not being “digital enough.” Shishkin’s proposed solutions are designed to replace this fear with a sense of shared purpose and exploration.
- “Creating an Amnesty for the Past”: This is a crucial and empathetic leadership gesture. It involves explicitly acknowledging the difficulty and anxiety of the past two decades of media disruption. It is a promise to staff that they will not be judged for their past skepticism or lack of digital skills. It wipes the slate clean and says, “We are all starting on this journey together from today.” This act of amnesty is designed to lower defenses and create the psychological safety necessary for people to be vulnerable, ask “stupid” questions, and try new things without fear of reprisal or condescension. It changes the dynamic from a management-versus-staff struggle to a collective endeavor.
- Institutionalizing Learning and Experimentation: Shishkin makes a radical proposal to institutionalize this new mindset: “every employee needs to have between two and four hours of obligatory learning every week.” This is a direct challenge to the relentless, production-focused “hamster wheel” of the modern newsroom. It reframes learning and experimentation not as a luxury to be done in one’s spare time, but as a core, non-negotiable part of the job. This time is not for producing more content. It is for proactive learning: trying a new AI tool, taking a course on data visualization, deconstructing a successful project from another newsroom, or, as he suggests, simply having a meeting where everyone shares one new tool or technique they’ve learned. This approach makes innovation a distributed responsibility rather than the sole purview of a small R&D team.
- Rewarding Curiosity and Valuing the Attempt: The culture must actively reward curiosity and de-stigmatize failure. Shishkin’s excitement about the idea of telling a story as a “mind map” is a perfect example. In a transformed culture, a journalist who proposes such an unconventional idea would be given the time and resources to try it. Crucially, if the experiment fails to attract a large audience, it is not treated as a failure but as a valuable data point. The success is in the attempt and the learning, not necessarily the outcome. This encourages the kind of creative risk-taking that leads to genuine breakthroughs in journalistic formats and storytelling. Leaders must model this behavior by celebrating intelligent failures as much as they celebrate successes.
- Fostering Collaboration: The new culture must be relentlessly collaborative. The siloed nature of traditional newsrooms (writers here, video producers there, product over there) is anathema to the integrated, niche-focused strategy Shishkin proposes. The transformed culture actively fosters and rewards cross-functional collaboration. It measures success not just by individual bylines but by the performance of the cross-functional “squad” responsible for a content proposition. This requires developing skills in communication, shared goal-setting, and mutual respect among people with very different professional backgrounds—journalists, engineers, data scientists, and marketers all working as peers.
Ultimately, Shishkin argues that the newsroom of the future is defined not by its technology or its business model, but by its people and their mindset. A transformed culture is one that is adaptive, resilient, and perpetually learning. It is a culture that empowers every individual to contribute to the organization’s evolution. Without this human-centric foundation, even the most brilliant content strategies, audience plans, and AI implementations will crumble under the weight of institutional inertia.