SODP Dispatch -11 June 2026

How Nation Media Group Built a Short-Video Newsroom That Competes With Entertainment

By Samuel Fatola

Short-form video has fundamentally rewired how audiences, particularly younger ones, discover, engage with, and share news. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels have become primary news gateways for a generation of consumers who were never going to seek out a homepage or a print edition. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025, over half of under-35s in the United States — 54% of 18–24s and 50% of 25–34s — now say that social media and video networks are their main source of news, up 13 and 6 percentage points respectively compared with the previous year. The shift is not confined to young people; all age groups are prioritising social media over traditional channels such as websites and TV news.

For most legacy publishers, the response has been reactive: repurpose existing TV packages, trim them down, post them on social, and hope the algorithm rewards the effort. It rarely does. For publishers that have not adapted their editorial approach to meet audiences where they actually are, that gap is widening into a structural audience crisis.

Nation Media Group took a different path. Rather than treating short-form video as a distribution channel, NMG built it as a dedicated editorial desk, with its own team, workflow, creative grammar, and performance logic. The results have been hard to ignore: a TikTok account that crossed one million followers, a single story, the Mercy Avoga “sticker girl” feature that generated 11 million views and 400,000 shares, and an emerging proof of concept that quality journalism, told in the right format, can compete with entertainment content for the attention of audiences who were never supposed to care about the news. For NMG, closing the gap meant rethinking not just where it published, but how content was built from the ground up.

📊 SODP San Francisco Study Tour 2026 – Publisher Ad Revenue Leaders

We are bringing together 8–12 senior publishing leaders in San Francisco for a private, two-day programme built around one question: what is actually driving signal and revenue in publishing today, and how are publishers monetising first-party data in the AI era?

The programme runs across partner offices, a Bay cruise, and a private dinner — a closed-door, operator-led experience under Chatham House Rules. No panels, no presentations, no vendor pitches. Just candid peer exchange across working sessions, roundtables, and fieldwork inside the platforms reshaping publisher economics.

Topics on the table include audience signal and identity infrastructure, first-party data monetisation, direct revenue strategies, commerce and content economics, and infrastructure as a commercial lever.

Date: June 15 & 16, 2026 — San Francisco, California

The speaker line-up includes:

• Nealesh Patel, Chief Revenue Officer at Crunchbase — scaling publisher revenue from $10M to $100M+ and AI-era GTM strategy

• Ruben Vardanyan, CEO of Joomag — revenue strategies, platform shifts, and the playbook for hitting new platforms in the current economic shift

• Amanda Hesser, Co-Founder and Chairman of Food52 — the economics of content, community, and commerce at scale, with first-party data threaded through

The programme also includes a Bridge-to-Bridge Bay Cruise, a private dinner at Taksim, and a peer-validated Revenue Plays Workshop where every attendee leaves with one accountable 90-day revenue play.

A special thank you to our partners, Ezoic, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Taksim, whose support, infrastructure, and hospitality make this programme possible and give attendees direct access to the platforms and environments shaping publisher economics today.

Attendance is complimentary for invited operators. The programme is strictly capped at 12 seats, and the final places are filling now.

Request your invitation here ▸

🎯 LiveRamp × OpenAI: Measure Your ChatGPT Ad Performance

If you're running or planning ads on ChatGPT, you can now close the measurement gap. LiveRamp's Conversions API (CAPI) Hub connects directly to ChatGPT ad campaigns via secure server-to-server data connections, meaning you get reliable conversion tracking without depending on browser-based signals that often break or go missing.

In practice, this means you can:

• See which ChatGPT campaigns are actually driving conversions — not just clicks

• Optimize spend in real time based on accurate performance data

• Justify and grow your ChatGPT ad budget with measurement data you can trust

As consumer journeys shift toward AI-powered platforms, this gives marketers the infrastructure to keep up, connecting data, measuring impact, and proving ROI on one of the fastest-growing ad surfaces in the world.

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By Vahe Arabian

💰 What Publishers Are Getting Wrong About AI Licensing

Every major AI company has now signed a content licensing deal with a publisher, and the number of those deals that will compound in value over time is much smaller than the press releases suggest.

The content licensing conversation currently has the surface characteristics of a gold rush: announcements, momentum, and the strong implication that publishers who move fast will capture something significant. What is harder to find is rigorous evidence of which deals are generating sustainable revenue versus which are one-time payments dressed as partnerships. The distinction matters enormously, and most publishers do not have the infrastructure to participate on the right side of it.

What the deals that are actually compounding have in common:

• Rights architecture established before negotiation — Publishers who entered licensing conversations with clearly documented content rights had negotiating leverage. Those who arrived without that architecture accepted the terms that were set for them.

• Structured, machine-readable content as the asset — Raw HTML archives are not what AI companies are paying premiums for. Publishers with clean metadata, consistent taxonomies, and documented editorial provenance are commanding significantly better terms because the content requires less processing to be useful at training or retrieval scale.

• Ongoing royalty structures over flat fees — The deals with long-term commercial value are structured around usage-based royalties or tiered access agreements with renewal terms. Flat fees, however large, cap value at the point of signing.

• Exclusivity handled carefully — Several publishers accepted exclusivity clauses that looked attractive at signing and have since become constraints as alternative buyers have emerged. Exclusivity without sunset clauses is a ceiling, not a floor.
  The gap is not content volume. It is content legibility, rights clarity, and the organisational capacity to negotiate deals with structured renewal value rather than accepting the first number offered.

AI companies are becoming more selective, not less. As model training cycles mature, the premium for verified, structured, high-provenance publisher archives is increasing, but so is the baseline requirement to access that premium. Publishers who treated the first wave of licensing conversations as a distraction still have time to build the infrastructure that positions them for the second wave.

The question every publisher should answer before the next licensing conversation is, do you know exactly what you own, how it is structured, and what you are willing to restrict?

If you cannot answer that clearly, you are not ready to negotiate; you are ready to accept terms.

As the trust economy emerges, social media measurements must evolve | INMA

For years, digital news strategies revolved around a familiar formula: publish quickly, optimise headlines, distribute aggressively on social media, and drive traffic back to owned platforms. AI is now disrupting that model faster than many publishers anticipated. The biggest AI transformation in news media is not happening inside the newsroom alone. It is happening in audience behaviour. Social platforms are increasingly becoming AI-assisted discovery engines where users consume summarised, contextualised, and personalised information without necessarily clicking on a news Web site.

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What kind of stories are best at turning local news readers into subscribers? It’s hard news, not the soft stuff | NiemanLab

Let’s start with the good news. What types of news stories are most likely to make a reader subscribe on a local newspaper’s website? Is it celebrity news, horoscopes, sports scores, the gardening column? Nope — it’s hard news. Local government, public health, politics — the sort of stuff that makes for a healthy democracy. Those stories are much more likely to turn a reader into a subscriber than the softer stuff. The bad news? Even those hard news stories don’t convert enough readers to sustain the cost of producing them.

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A free society requires journalists work like scientists, not artists | Editor & Publisher Magazine

Is journalism an art or a science? That’s the core question in a critique of the “Amazonification” of The Washington Post published in the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this year. The authors posit that billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, with his focus on data analysis and efficiency, is simply “the latest in a long line of business minds flummoxed by a long-standing conundrum” about the nature of journalism and the necessary conditions for its production. To make their case, the authors present two contrasting newsroom management scenarios.

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German Court Tells Google: Your AI Answers Are Your Problem | Search Engine World

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages.

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Europe's news has an experience problem it can fix | NewsTechNavigator

Last week I argued that the regulators’ AI opt-out and the licensing deals everyone is waiting on both miss the real pressure on news. People are starting to get it, or at least to satisfy the need for it, from a machine. This week I want to follow one strand of that, the one a publisher can act on without a regulator’s help. A good part of why people ask the machine first is that the machine is clean. The answer takes about as long to generate as a news homepage takes to load, and some AI tools will even schedule the updates you want.

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WebMCP Can Be Used To Hijack AI Agents, Chrome Warns | SEJ

Google Chrome is warning developers that WebMCP tools can be used to manipulate and hijack AI agents. New guidance outlines how attackers can manipulate agents operating in a user’s browser, including within their authenticated sessions. Chrome published two guides, one for web developers and another for AI agent developers. The warning has two disclaimers that explain that the exploits are not specific to WebMCP but are flaws inherent in LLMs and Chrome extensions. The first disclaimer says the threat is not unique to WebMCP.

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