The ground has moved
Media Advisory Services (MAS), MDIF’s in-house venture support unit that I lead, was built around media viability. It helps clients strengthen their businesses so they can better serve their communities and build the financial resilience to stay independent, or, in the case of pipeline partners, become investment-ready.
What viability requires has now fundamentally changed, and AI is the main reason.
The intermediaries that once drove audiences to independent media are breaking down. AI-powered search delivers instant answers without routing anyone back to original sources.
AI Overviews in Google search results cut click-through rates almost in half. Across the news sector, more than 600 million monthly visits were lost in under a year. In a survey of 280 media leaders, publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40% over the next three years.
I have been in this industry long enough not to frame every disruption as purely a threat, and I won’t start now. But the economics of traffic-dependent revenue are deteriorating fast, and the small and mid-size independent outlets are the ones who are feeling it most acutely. What matters now is how quickly we adapt and whether we’re willing to think big enough.
Adoption is widespread. Transformation isn’t.
Helping media companies navigate this shift starts with knowing where they stand and where they need to go. We recently hosted Katya Gorchinskaya on our monthly MAS Global Community call to walk clients and partners through JIndex, a source-linked index of AI adoption in news media with 3,800+ verified cases across 150+ countries.
She uses a five-stage ladder of AI maturity:
1. Access — tools available, used occasionally
2. Adoption — a team uses AI routinely
3. Proficiency — targets set, results tracked.
4. Ways of working — AI rebuilt into workflows.
5. Reorganizing — new business models and products, with AI at the coreMost people on our call placed themselves at stage two.
The index says the wider sector is in the same place: of all documented cases, roughly one percent come from organizations that have reorganized the business around AI.
Katya’s view is that organizations should be at stage four by now, with AI rebuilt into their workflows, and their leaders thinking at stage five. Where the adoption is happening matters as much as how far it has gone. Around 60% of cases on JIndex are editorial production. Monetization accounts for roughly one in ten.
The sector is putting six times more documented effort into making journalism than into the parts of the business that sustain it: marketing, distribution, community, revenue.
That is an efficiency response to a structural challenge. It buys time. It does not buy a future.Katya sees the risk to smaller independent outlets as two-fold.
“Unless most of their relationship with audiences is direct — which is rarely the case — they risk becoming ‘invisible’ for people who are increasingly moving to agent-mediated information consumption. This would question their entire raison d’être,” she says.
“Secondly, the quicker the outlets move past denial and even experimentation, to systematic AI exploration and adoption, the quicker they will be able to figure out what their next business model will look like. The industry’s behemoths are doing it right now. They devote a lot of effort to this business model reinvention and to building deep infrastructure that will support it in the future. The rest of the industry should take note of that.”
What this asks of us
We see this in our work too. Across MAS interventions in 2026, the biggest barrier to AI adoption was not technology. It was organizational process and readiness for change. Leaders, founders and management must be willing to embrace genuinely different ways of working. That is hard. Everyone’s job changes, not just the ones closest to the technology.
At MAS, we strongly believe that independent media’s survival now demands transformation, and our job is to assist businesses through this transition. To stay viable today, media companies need to fundamentally rethink how they operate and do business in an industry being reshaped by AI.
Our work ahead is to evolve from a support service into a transformation partner and help leaders make the decisions they have been putting off.
The organizations that emerge strongest from this period will be those whose leaders are honest about what is happening and make the bold choices early, rather than waiting for the platforms to change course.A good start, if you are a media leader, is to find out where you actually are on that five-stage scale, honestly, including the parts of the business that are not the newsroom.
Impact in Action
At Romania’s media outlet HotNews, AI is moving beyond individual experiments and becoming part of how the entire organization works.
HotNews, which is backed by MDIF-managed fund Pluralis, decided to take a company-wide approach to AI adoption, looking at how it could support both the newsroom and the wider business. Working with Lukas Görög, MDIF’s AI Entrepreneur-in-Residence, the team developed a strategy, trained staff and began integrating AI into everyday workflows.
The process began with clear guidelines for responsible AI use, agreed by senior leadership and introduced across the organization, giving all 86 employees a common set of rules to follow.
Training helped put the strategy into practice, with 20 staff members becoming internal AI champions and driving the development of tools tailored to HotNews’ needs. The results include four company-level agents handling sales pitches, competitor monitoring, translation and reporting; 16 editorial skills covering journalism, social media and reader interaction; and three CMS plugins for summaries, translation and grammar checks.
With leadership support, clear guidelines and staff actively involved in shaping how AI is used, HotNews has laid the groundwork to tackle the bigger questions Patricia and Katya raise above.
The writer is Patricia Torres-Burd, Managing Director, Media Advisory Services
