#19 - Newsrooms face a left-brain/right-brain divide

Originally published in Nieman Lab Predictions for Journalism, 2025.

The real divide in newsrooms isn’t between editorial and advertising — it’s between left-brain (math, logic) and right-brain (creativity, intuition) functions.

Hidden left-brained infrastructure underpins modern media businesses. It enables editors, product managers, brand strategists, developers, and sales teams to focus on higher-order, right-brain problems. In print publishing, this hidden infrastructure manages printing, sales, and distribution. On YouTube, this hidden infrastructure is the algorithm. For logged-out websites, this hidden infrastructure is Google SEO and Discover.

I’ve observed this dichotomy firsthand. At The Times of India, I led editorial product until 2021. Since 2022, I’ve been building recommendation models.

When left-brain thinkers dominate, media products face a value proposition crisis — funnels and operations are optimized, but creativity is stifled. Conversely, when right-brain thinkers dominate, you get overly creative editorial products — like an Indo-Tibetan fusion restaurant in Ireland. Unique? Yes. In demand? No.

Today’s media products resemble the feature phones of the pre-iPhone era — a patchwork of ideas with obsessive focus on visual differentiation. Nokia’s downfall stemmed from similar misplaced priorities.

The solution: Platformization of news

Once platformization worked with the iPhone, all phones adopted the flat glass slab form. Competition shifted to specs and algorithms, while the creativity migrated to apps. The best of those apps were eventually integrated into the platform.

Platformization works because, once self-learning AI stabilizes, it drives growth independently, eliminating the need for constant operations. This stability compounds over time, allowing teams to concentrate on the next major release, raising the baseline while safeguarding prior gains. The process is slow, deliberate, and sustainable. The compounding gains from AI are so vast that visual differentiation seems less appealing. Similarly, once platformization worked for Big Tech, all media feeds standardized their UX down to feeds and search.

My prediction for 2025 is that news conglomerates will reorganize into two business units:

• Off-platform revenue: focused on third-party algorithms (e.g., SEO, Discover, YouTube) and generating revenue from logged-out websites.
• On-platform revenue: dedicated to building revenue streams within owned and operated platforms — apps and logged-in websites.

On-platform, the left-brainers will platformize:

• One universal brand: Today, a reader might turn to Vox for news but choose Wirecutter (part of The New York Times) over The Strategist (part of Vox Media) for product recommendations. News conglomerates will bridge this gap by serving all content across their brands, wherever the user is.
• One super app: To reduce customer acquisition costs, conglomerates will consolidate their brands into a single super app or website behind a login wall, as Disney+ is doing with Hulu and ESPN+.
• Recommenders as hidden infrastructure: Recommendation systems will evolve to go beyond personalization, taking on tasks like optimization and managing trade-offs (on metrics like retention, revenue, engagement, and conversion).
• Monetize using targeted ads and subscriptions: Most publishers can’t succeed with subscriptions. The few that can will hit growth plateaus. Mature content recommenders will enable the development of advanced native ad-targeting systems.
• Category shift: News as a category is limiting. News firms can’t tap into user-generated content in the way social media firms can. Instead, news firms will expand into the candid content category as defined by Alberto Cairo in his book The Truthful Art.
• Business model for syndication: Mature content-recommendation systems will be adapted for YouTube-like revenue-sharing syndication models. News firms will syndicate truthful content from experts who write as a byproduct of their professional work.
• Standardized UX: All brands within a conglomerate will adhere to a single user experience to ensure algorithms function seamlessly.

With the hidden infrastructure settled, the right-brainers operate on the platform, as they would on YouTube, Google Ad Manager, or the iOS App Store:

• Creators publish content on the super app in allowed formats, as they would on YouTube, and then wait for engagement and revenue attribution.
• Product managers and developers publish plugins/apps (games, sports scorecards, election dashboards, etc.) and then wait for engagement and revenue attribution.
• Ad teams publish campaigns with interesting creatives and then wait for impressions, clicks, and leads.

Balancing left-brain efficiency with right-brain creativity through platformization will define the media industry’s success in 2025 and beyond.