You Don't Control Where People Find You Anymore

Future of Media Technology Conference, London, September 2026.

I spent a day recently at the Press Gazette Future of Media and Technology conference in London.

Not surprisingly, AI dominated much of the conversation.

For publishers, one of the big questions is what happens when AI platforms scrape, summarise and answer questions using journalism that was expensive to produce - potentially without sending the audience anywhere near the original publisher.

There was an interesting paradox in that for me.

Many of the organisations and leaders I work with have almost the opposite problem.

They want to be found.

They want their expertise, ideas and point of view to surface when somebody searches for a subject, watches a video, scrolls through LinkedIn - or increasingly asks an AI assistant a question.

And that made one presentation at the conference particularly interesting.

The audience is moving

The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026 charts a significant change in how people find news.

For the first time across the 48 markets surveyed, social media and video networks have overtaken news organisations' own websites and apps as a source of news: 54% compared with 51%.

Add AI chatbots and the figure for third-party sources rises to 56%. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk

Online video continues to grow too.

Reuters reports that 77% of people now consume online news video each week. And that growth is happening on third-party platforms rather than publishers' own websites and apps. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk

AI is another part of that fragmentation.

Ten per cent of respondents now use AI chatbots for news, rising to 16% among under-35s.

It's still relatively small - and in the UK chatbot use for news is particularly low - but it is another way in which somebody else increasingly sits between the organisation producing information and the person consuming it. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk

For news publishers, that's a considerable commercial problem.

But I think there's a wider communications issue here too.

We used to choose the channel

When I started in broadcasting, the routes to an audience were relatively straightforward.

If an organisation wanted to reach people, it might talk to a newspaper, radio station or television programme.

Later came websites. Then social media. Then podcasts and YouTube.

Now the journey is much harder to predict.

Someone might encounter your organisation through a television interview. Someone else sees a 30-second extract on social media.

Another person hears the CEO on a podcast.

Someone finds an old article through Google.

And increasingly, someone may simply ask an AI tool:

"What does this organisation actually do?"

They may never visit your website at all.

That's quite a change for anybody responsible for communication.

The answer isn't to be everywhere

The temptation is to respond by chasing platforms.

We need a podcast.

We need more video.

We should be on TikTok.

What are we doing about AI?

Sometimes one of those things will be right.

But I'm not convinced the starting point should be the platform.

It should be what you actually want people to understand about you.

Because if your chief executive describes the organisation one way in an interview, your website says something slightly different, your LinkedIn feed is full of generic corporate language and an AI system discovers something else in an article from three years ago, adding another channel isn't going to solve the problem.

It may simply amplify the confusion.

Communication has to survive the journey

For me, that's one of the more interesting implications of the Reuters research.

Organisations have less control over where people encounter them.

They also have less control over the context in which their words appear.

An hour-long interview becomes a 30-second clip.

A report becomes a search result. A collection of webpages becomes three paragraphs generated by AI.

So perhaps the communications challenge isn't simply producing more content.

It's having enough clarity and consistency at the centre that your story still makes sense after it has travelled through all these different channels.

That means knowing what you stand for.

Knowing what you want people to understand.

And making sure the people who represent the organisation have the executive communication skills to explain it clearly, naturally and consistently - whether they're speaking to a journalist, recording a podcast or answering a question at a conference.

The communications question used to be:

Where should we say it?

Increasingly, I think there's another question to ask first:

Is what we're saying clear enough to survive wherever people find it?

Source: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2026. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk