A few years from now, your reader may ask their assistant what the new planning proposal means for their street. The assistant pulls from hundreds of sources, checks them, folds in what it knows about their commute and mortgage, and hands them an answer. Your article might have been one of those sources. The reader never saw your homepage or your headline, and they never learned your name.

That scenario sits at the heart of a September 2026 report called Value in the emerging AI-mediated information ecosystem. Between December 2025 and May 2026, David Caswell and Shuwei Fang ran four summits in the US and Europe. They gathered people from technology, investment, governance and academia, with a sprinkling from media, and put one question to them: if AI reorganises how information is gathered, checked, delivered and paid for, where does the value end up?

The answers are useful if you run or work in a newsroom. Here is how to put them to work.

First, the bad news, straight from the authors

The report describes traditional secondary producers, meaning outlets that take information from sources and package it into articles, as "the most vulnerable position" to be in. Unless you control something scarce, your output can become an easily swapped processing layer.

The good news comes in the very next breath. The report lists what counts as scarce, and plenty of it describes things newsrooms already do well. Let's go through them.