Taneth Evans (Wall Street Journal), Steve Sachs (Guardian US MD), Melissa Rubinson (BBC) , Joe Croney (CTO for Arc XP) and Dominic Ponsford of Press Gazette.
‘Hyper-personalisation’ is one of the biggest opportunities for publishers created by AI technology, according to the head of digital at the Wall Street Journal Taneth Evans.
She was speaking as part of a panel discussion on “Web 3.0 and the Future of Media” at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event in New York (which was sponsored by Arc XP).
She said: “The thing I’m really excited about is that I think it’s the era that we will begin to take in true personalisation. I think new audiences expect it.
“I think no one in the news industry has really cracked it. Lots of people have done really cool and exciting things. Our friends in Scandinavia are running really successful, personalised home pages.
“But at the Wall Street Journal, it’s really tricky, because you talk to our users, if you talk about personalisation, they say, ‘no, don’t want it’.
“They say ‘I pay for the Wall Street Journal to tell me what’s important that day’. And so it’s important to us that we retain that kind of curated editorial experience and editorial homepage.
“And so then you think about what personalisation looks like without creating filter bubbles and sending people into this place that they don’t want. And for me, that’s not personalisation of topic, which is what we’ve all kind of experimented with so far, it’s personalisation of format and storytelling.
“And what has been a kind of pipe dream for many years but now, with AI, it becomes a reality. And for me, when I think about 3.0 it’s that really exciting reality of true hyper personalisation for our audiences.”
Evans said this could involve tailoring content to readers in the format which they prefer: such as audio, video or text.
The Wall Street Journal grew its total digital subscribers to 4.2 million in September 2025 (up 11% year on year).
Asked what sort of content is driving these numbers, Evan said: “Scoops are king. If we can say something new to people, they’ll come and they’ll pay for it. That’s led to a real kind of doubling down on scoops and exclusives in the newsroom.
“But it’s also our expertise and our analysis.
“If we can take a commodity fact of the day and tell people what it means for them, that really works for us.
“We’ve done a lot of work over the past couple of years on making sure people know why they should come to us, making sure people know who our columnists and who our experts are, and why they should trust them.
“And we’ve been injecting a little more voice into the journal. Opinion and the newsroom are a totally separate team, but there’s a big difference between adding voice and analysis and authority into your journalism and veering into opinion and I think we’ve really successfully done that, and with great reward.”
Chief technology officer of Arc XP (the Washington Post newsroom technology provider which powers thousands of websites) Joe Croney spoke on the same panel.
He said: “We were seeing a pattern where our customers were saying the industry has changed. Direct traffic is declining, subscriptions is a key component going forward. But really, a revolution was required, and our observation was the industry had lost touch with our customers, with the actual audience.”
Describing Audience 3.0 he said: “It’s that Tiktok experience, that immersive experience, that bi-directional experience, where the audience is more of a stakeholder in the content, as opposed to just receiving what is sent from us.
“I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to do hyper-personalisation. There is a lot of debate though, in the industry, about, is it okay if each one of us receives a different version of a story? Does that deteriorate our brand’s value in terms of having a perspective on the world?
“I think the technology at hand allows us to solve that challenge with AI. Our fundamental belief is you can take the atoms of a story, reconstruct those in a way that is personalised, without losing the human element of the storyteller. And so that’s really the challenge my team is working on right now.”
Senior vice president of business development at the BBC Melissa Rubinson said that for her Web 3.0 is “the shift from publishers’ dependency on platforms to focusing on direct engagement with our audiences”.
She added: “I think there’s also an element of it where we are seeing the emergence of two internets, one that will be text based and optimised for bots and agents, and another that will be an immersive visual and audio experiences for humans, and I think all of us here as premium publishers really need to own that human side of the equation.”
Guardian managing director for the US Steve Sachs spoke about the huge success of The Guardian’s membership model in recent years – which saw reader revenue grow 22% to £107m in the year to the end of March 2025.
Speaking about the opportunities for publishers he said: “You need to understand consumers, an you need to build a value proposition that speaks to them. And if you can do that, you can become successful even in the midst of all the chaos.”
The Media Strategy Network USA event included ten sponsored round-table discussions featuring more than 100 publishers, technology providers and media experts. While conversations were off the record, three key insights were shared on Linkedin.
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