A French dispatch: How newsrooms are defying platform reliance and taking back control

Your francophone correspondent travelled to Nantes and Paris in late September to join journalists at two annual gatherings: the 2026 Festival de L’info Locale (FIL) and the Audiencers Festival.

The challenges facing the industry are clear: news brands rely on third-party platforms to reach audiences; they struggle to maintain readers’ trust and convince them to pay for their work; their reporting is being scraped by AI companies; and they are threatened by another wave of tech disruptions that risk upending their business models.

Against this backdrop, speakers and participants sounded defiant, with the focus at both events on solutions rather than doom-mongering. Here are three main strategies that emerged.

1. News organisations are joining forces

Many speakers shared experiences about the benefits of working with colleagues outside from other newsrooms. In a FIL session on how the journalism industry can hold its own in the face of AI players, David Buttle spoke about the newly formed SPUR coalition, which my colleague Marina Adami featured in this recent piece.

SPUR brings together news publishers to push for technical and regulatory solutions to AI scraping – and ultimately, to ensure the journalism industry is paid fairly. The news media should not underestimate their collective leverage, Buttle said. They hold something AI companies want: accurate, quality journalism to train their models. With initiatives like SPUR, he argued, the industry can band together to raise the technical cost and legal risk of scraping until it is no longer worth it.

Sessions at both conferences also showed how smaller outlets can partner to extend their reach. Rhiannon Davies from Greater Community Media shared lessons from the Scottish Beacon’s model: a network of independent, community-based news publishers in Scotland. The Beacon now counts more than 20 member newsrooms and has just launched its own Scottish Environmental Journalism Network.

Davies’ advice for others who want to experiment with collaboration is to start with a specific reporting project rather than a platform, spend time agreeing on shared goals between publishers before launch and, most importantly, hire a project manager if you can. These initiatives can be deceptively labour-intensive, she said. You can’t just tack them onto a day job if you want them to succeed.

Another example came from the Portail des médias indépendants, created by Basta! media. Nicolas Camiera from Basta! explained how the project came out of frustration at how small and independent outlets are rarely visible on aggregators like Google News, despite their reporting’s quality. The initiative pulls together a daily round-up of stories from independent media around France and elsewhere, giving readers easy, human-curated access to a range of local and independent content – and helping spread local reporting’s reach.

Sara Goo from The Washington Post spoke about the Post’s initial experiments in working with creators. She argued that well-managed newsroom-creator partnerships can benefit both sides. Newsrooms have the legal and fact-checking resources, she said, while creators have the direct relationships with audiences.

At the Post, creators publish Post-vetted content on their own channels, and the Post publishes the creator-made videos on its website and app, each introducing its audience to the other. It’s early days, Goo said, but the feedback has been positive so far, and it’s allowed the Post to reach younger demographics.

2. Newsrooms are regaining independence from platforms (where they can)

A second set of strategies focused on reducing newsrooms’ reliance on platforms and building direct relationships with readers instead.

The trade-offs for publishers are clear by now: Building your audience on platforms is unreliable, as algorithms are opaque and change without warning. Building your audience on your own platform offers autonomy and resilience, but takes a lot of time and resources to build.

A few newsrooms shared how they are betting on autonomy and investing in channels they own. In a session on audio journalism at the Audiencers Festival, Quentin Leredde from Le Monde and Olivier Cambournac from Jeune Afrique Media Group spoke about investing in in-app audio to build direct habits with their audiences.

In another session, Céline Orjubin from the popular Parisian culture site My Little Paris explained how the project started in 2008 as a direct newsletter, with no initial reliance on platforms, and has grown to 250,000 subscribers since. This direct relationship has allowed them to grow into a broader media brand and a community, expanding into a printed quarterly paper and popular in-person events.

There were also wider, unresolved discussions around digital sovereignty, and how much of a priority it needs to be: Do newsrooms need to start seeing themselves as technology platforms as well as publishers? Should they invest in local or in-house tools? Or is that a waste of resources better spent on reporting, relying instead on off-the-shelf products? It’s up for each newsroom to decide.

3. Newsrooms are using tools and metrics on their own terms

The third set of strategies discussed in both conferences revolved around how to be deliberate about which tech tools to adopt and why. Several speakers stressed the importance of adopting AI for specific, intentional purposes rather than to blindly join the bandwagon.

AI for audio was a case in point. Jeune Afrique shared how it is turning articles into automated audio using an AI version of the voice of its editor, Marwane Ben Yahmed, trained on hours of him reading text aloud. The idea is both to make articles available in a more accessible format and to create a personal link between the audience and the newsroom through its editor’s voice.

Gwara Media in Ukraine also shared an AI tool built in response to a specific user need: a chatbot that fact-checks information in war zones, using the newsroom’s own reporting as source material. As a side benefit, the bot has produced a dataset of 100,000 user questions, Gwara’s editor Serhii Prokopenko said, an invaluable insight into what their readers actually want to know.

Sandro Martin from Le Nouvel Obs said they were ensuring basic AI literacy for everyone in the newsroom, with each team then deciding if and how to use AI tools for their own work. Staff will use AI anyway, he said, so organisations need a strategy, which might include offering paid, vetted tools, rather than letting staff use free versions which carry security and quality risks.

In a session at the Audiencers Festival on the limits of metrics, researcher Sophie Chauvet made an adjacent point, saying newsrooms should keep questioning the metrics they use. Page views and shares are easy to count, she said, but they miss whether an article came up in a reader’s dinner conversation, for example, or changed their point of view. She cited Goodhart’s law: when reaching a certain metric becomes the goal in and of itself, it stops being a good measure. Her advice was to ask yourself and your team honestly whether you have slipped into this territory.