What If News Has a Product Problem?

Hey friends — happy Advertising Week.

Looking forward to running into many of you around the city this week. I am sure we will talk about AI, Agents, CTV, brand safety, outcomes, measurement, and probably AI & Agents again. But there is something else I have been thinking about for the last couple of weeks.

This one is personal and has nothing to do with my day job. 🙂

About two weeks ago, I was on the subway one morning and overheard two young professionals, probably in their late 20s, talking on their way to work. It made something click in my head about a pattern I had been noticing for a while. One of them said something like, “I think I’m gonna quit TikTok. It’s all news and AI nowadays.”

I am old enough to remember a very different relationship with news.

Growing up in Istanbul, on weekend mornings my mom or dad would give me some money and send me to the corner store. Get bread. Maybe milk. And definitely a newspaper or two. I would come home and flip the newspaper over. Sports were in the back. That was my section. Then maybe the comics. My parents would read the front pages, politics, the world, whatever was happening that week.

Nobody was teaching me that consuming news was an important civic responsibility. I entered through football — the one that you actually play with your foot — and comics. The rest of the world slowly came along with it.

Then the internet arrived. We watched news become instant, searchable, global, and often free. For those of us in advertising, that became part of the mission too: advertising could help make information and content available to everyone.

Over time, the conversation shifted toward the economics of journalism. How do we monetize news? Why are advertisers avoiding it? How should brand safety work? How do publishers survive? Then social media became one of the primary ways people encountered news, and the industry adjusted to that reality too.

We have spent a lot of time trying to solve those problems. But hearing that sentence on the subway made me wonder whether we might be solving only part of the problem.

What if news has a product problem?

Distribution has changed dramatically. Newspapers became websites. Television segments became clips. Video became vertical. Algorithms became the front page. But I am not sure the basic product has changed nearly as much.

A long article displayed on a phone is still basically an article. Three people sitting behind a desk on television are still three people sitting behind a desk, even when the segment gets chopped into six clips for social media.

We have changed how news reaches people. But have we actually reinvented news itself for a 22-year-old? A 17-year-old? A 12-year-old?

And I do not think the answer is simply “make everything shorter.” Maybe younger generations do not dislike news. Maybe we just have not figured out what news should look and feel like for them.

That worries me more than the monetization question, because news is one of the ways we discover that the world is larger than our immediate circle — larger than our friends, our neighborhood, our industry, our country, our politics, our algorithm.

Without that exposure, we may not become uninformed in the traditional sense. We might actually consume more information than any generation before us. But it may become an increasingly narrow slice of reality.

And somewhere in all of this, I keep thinking about that newspaper from my childhood. It had politics and international news, but it also had football, comics, culture, weather, puzzles. There were many doors into the same product. I entered through sports.

Maybe part of the challenge ahead is creating new doors.

So this week, while we are all in New York talking about AI, Agents, brand safety, outcomes, CTV, measurement and how to better monetize content, perhaps we should spend a little time on another question: what does news need to become so that the next generation actually wants it?

Not because we need another audience segment to monetize, but because somehow one generation has to hand the world to the next one, and understanding that world feels like a reasonably important part of the handoff.

Perhaps we have spent years trying to solve the economics of news while slowly losing the habit of news.