Media Leaders Are Finally Breaking Up With Algorithms

NEW YORK — The era of “renting” audiences from Big Tech is officially over. For years, publishers chased scale by appeasing the opaque algorithms of search and social platforms, only to watch traffic evaporate with a single code update. At TVNewsCheck’s NewsTechForum 2025, a clear consensus emerged among digital leaders: The future isn’t about broad reach; it’s about deep, direct ownership.

“They were renting the relationship with their audience as opposed to owning a really meaningful line of communication,” said Michael Donoghue, CEO of Subtext, describing the industry’s previous reliance on social platforms. The pivot now is toward “owned” channels — SMS, newsletters and bespoke communities — where the publisher, not a third-party algorithm, controls the dial.

During the “Breaking Out With Best-in-Class Digital” session, executives from NBCUniversal Local, Wired and x.news detailed how they are dismantling the old “traffic-at-all-costs” models in favor of strategies that prioritize retention, human connection and trust.

The New KPI: Trust As An Engagement Strategy

The most radical shift isn’t technological; it’s cultural. NBCUniversal Local recently concluded an ambitious experiment across 26 markets, training 115 journalists to act as “news influencers” on their personal social handles. The goal wasn’t just clicks; it was to utilize the inherent trust audiences have in individual humans.

“People were making the decision of what website to visit, what channel to turn on, what app to install based on who they trusted on social media,” said Sari Zeidler, VP of audience development at NBCUniversal Local.

The results were staggering. By empowering journalists to post vertical video and engage authentically — without the heavy hand of corporate branding — NBCU saw engagement lifts averaging 80%. “These weren’t people who were just passively following … . These were people who were genuinely engaging in our news,” Zeidler said.

Direct Channels: The ‘Access’ Economy

While NBCU leveraged social personalities, Wired and Subtext focused on the inbox and the text message — spaces that feel intimate and exclusive.

Veronica de Souza, executive director of audience and content strategy at Wired, revealed that the publication launched five premium, subscriber-only newsletters designed to simulate a direct line to their experts. “Access to an expert is more valuable now than it has ever been,” de Souza said. By answering reader questions directly in these newsletters, Wired saw immediate spikes in replies, proving that audiences are starving for validation. “They don’t just want to shout into the void,” she added.

Donoghue backed this up with hard data from the SMS front. Subtext, which facilitates text-based communities for publishers, boasts open rates of 98% and reply rates north of 40%. “One of the common traits of doing SMS well is really simplifying it and really being yourself,” Donoghue said. “Nobody signs their text messages.”

The AI Reality Check: Plumbing, Not Poetry

Despite the hype surrounding generative AI, the panel offered a refreshing dose of skepticism regarding its role in content creation. The consensus? Use AI to fix the plumbing, not to write the poetry.

“We’re really not using it for generative content,” Zeidler said. Instead, NBCU employs custom GPTs for heavy lifting — analyzing search console data, optimizing email subject lines and scaling backend workflows.

Andreas Pongratz, CEO of x.news, echoed this operational focus. His company uses algorithms not to generate news, but to detect urgency and ensure safety within the local communities they build. “The only thing you need to make sure is that you have algorithms in place that are detecting images … or detecting that urgency to re-communicate,” Pongratz said.

Surviving The ‘Zero-Click’ Future

Looming over the discussion was the specter of the “zero-click” world — an internet where AI overviews and social platforms satisfy user queries without ever sending traffic to a publisher’s site.

“We’re living in an increasingly zero-click world,” Zeidler said. The response isn’t to fight the tide but to change the measurement of success. If the platform satisfies the user’s need, the metric cannot be a pageview; it must be brand affinity or direct capture.

De Souza agreed, noting that while SEO remains a technical necessity, the “traffic pie” is permanently shrinking. “It’s an opportunity to retake the wheel and drive the car again,” she said. “Scale means something else now.”

The Bottom Line

The digital strategy of 2026 isn’t about outsmarting Google or viralizing on TikTok. It is about building a product good enough that users will willingly hand over their phone number or email address to get it.

As de Souza put it, the goal is to stop relying on the “various algorithms that rule our lives” and build a business that can stand on its own two feet. “Access to an expert is more valuable now than it has ever been,” she said.

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