Time will be your greatest asset

2025 has felt like it shrank in the wash – another year of recalibrating editorial and business strategies in the face of AI upheaval to newsroom workflows, fierce competition from creator-led media, and shrinking audience wallets.

Time is our scarcest commodity. Everyone I know is howling for more of it. Next year will be just as relentless. Freeing up time will confer a competitive advantage in 2026.

First, look at how time is allocated. Take a blunt look at your calendar. Can a meeting be replaced or augmented by a project management tool? Can a guest list be cut back to just the people who need to be in the room? Can a weekly meeting become fortnightly?

Ensure people arrive at and leave meetings better prepared. Ask them to add talking points and pre-reading to an agenda document beforehand, and spend the last five minutes of every meeting on capturing who’s doing what and an agreed deadline.

And ask your team to help track down hidden nuggets of time. All kinds of ideas will bubble up. Maybe someone needs a dongle to answer emails on the train, or a tool to automate a regular task, or a new workflow to tackle annoying bottlenecks.

Second, deliberately allocate time to value-add activities. Non-BAU (business as usual) activities like strategic planning, project design and skills development are often the things we say we’re too busy to do, but they’re vital for a newsroom to thrive.

To bake these activities into newsroom culture, consider dedicating part of a specific day each week or month to them. Decide what proportion of each role’s time should be allocated to value-add activities and get that time added to calendars.

We can’t outrun disruption. But we can choose to spend our time intentionally, so we can think, plan, and learn to respond to it more effectively.