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# News needs entrepreneurs. Where will they come from?
- URL: https://werd.io/news-needs-entrepreneurs-where-will-they-come-from/
- Published: 2026-11-12T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-12T10:00:00.000Z
- Description: Newsrooms are optimizing their way through an existential threat. Changing that starts with who we ask to lead, and how they learn to do it.
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: Future of News, JSK Fellowship

“What is the *New York Times* doing?”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard that in various journalistic settings: inside newsrooms, in the hallways at conferences, in cross-newsroom chats. It makes some sense: the *Times* is the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, and its size and wealth give it the power to innovate and maneuver.

On the other hand, I often found myself thinking: *where is the imagination?*

Copying a larger newsroom with a different focus and set of resources available to it is not a strategy. Neither is incremental optimization. And they’re certainly not innovation.

Unlike the *Times*, which has cemented its position through a smart portfolio of services like games, recipes, and product recommendations, [news as an industry is dying](https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/news/2025/news-deserts-hit-new-high-and-50-million-have-limited-access-to-local-news-study-finds.html). In the US we lose at least two newsrooms a week. Newsroom leaders can’t afford to be followers.

Newsrooms need to change. The question is: *how?*

Most newsrooms are a fraction of the size of the *New York Times* and can’t follow its strategy. (And anyway, the *Times* has taken those positions.) But they can follow its openness to radical change.

### Relative safety vs existential threat

Fifteen years ago, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz [published his definition of a peacetime CEO vs a wartime CEO](https://a16z.com/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/):

> Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage vs. the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths.  
>  
> In wartime, a company is fending off an imminent existential threat.

As much as I have differences with a16z’s business priorities and [its impact on democracy in the years since](https://bookshop.org/a/7949/9781668221402), I think this is a useful high-level frame. Whereas Horowitz’s companies needed to win against their competitors, newsrooms need to adapt to a rapidly changing world — but it’s an existential threat nonetheless.

A peacetime CEO can focus on improving what the company already does: it’s already winning, and the way to improve its standing is to optimize. On the other hand, a wartime CEO needs to take more risks and be unafraid to fundamentally change the business or to kill sacred cows. A peacetime CEO may feel like they don’t need to understand their customers more deeply, because it’s already working; a wartime CEO needs to understand them incredibly deeply so they can beat their competition.

Let’s ditch Horowitz’s unpleasant war language and call these scenarios *relative safety* and *existential threat*. And then let’s turn this lens towards news.

Journalism is operating in an existential threat environment. We are in the fastest period of technical change in my lifetime, and the fastest period of *democratic* change. The institutions people trust, the places they get their information, and the pressures on anyone who tries to hold power to account are all shifting at once. This should also imply the fastest period of *journalistic* change. Instead, most newsrooms are in decline; the industry certainly is.

Newsrooms are organizationally really interesting. Very often, the CEO (or effective CEO) is a journalist rather than an experienced business operator, and is hyper-focused on the journalistic process and reporting great stories. I don’t think that’s unreasonable on its face: journalism is, after all, at the core of what a newsroom does, and putting a journalist in charge enshrines journalistic values at the center of the organization. But it does mean the hard task of building strategy often ends up sitting elsewhere. The hard task of building a culture that supports innovation, meanwhile, is often missing in action.

A small number of newsrooms are lucky enough to employ a Chief Strategy Officer. [The 19th](https://19thnews.org) (where I worked as CTO) has [Alexandra Smith](https://19thnews.org/author/alexandra-smith/); [The Marshall Project](https://www.themarshallproject.org/) has [Ebony Reed](https://www.themarshallproject.org/staff/ebony-reed). The largest newsrooms have multiple full-blown strategy teams. But most have no-one. That leaves strategy in the hands of a Product lead — if one exists.

Sometimes, particularly in smaller newsrooms, no-one’s watching the ball at all. Other times, the Product lead acts as if we’re in a time of relative safety, tweaking dials and optimizing workflows without meaningfully engaging with the existential threat. [But building culture and strategy to solve for the industry’s existential problems is where the real work needs to be done.](https://pointc.co/the-two-rails-of-leadership/)

And that work is mostly *not* being done. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s [2026 Trends and Predictions report](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-trends-and-predictions-2026) finds that 59% of digital leaders are focused on improving their core products rather than reinventing them. ASU’s recent [News + AI Field Report](https://cronkite.asu.edu/knightcenter/field-report-AI-in-news), written by my [JSK](https://jsk.stanford.edu) advisor [Djordje Padejski](https://www.djordje.padejski.net/), rounds up AI-assisted innovation projects across newsrooms between 2022 and 2025\. [As I noted at the time](https://werd.io/a-landmark-study-of-ai-in-newsrooms-reveals-they-need-to-be-coaxed-to-experiment-with-their-business-models/), only 20% of them involved business experimentation, and most of *those* were conducted in programs that paid newsrooms to do business experimentation.

My conclusion is that it’s simply not within the comfort zone of most newsroom leadership, which is editorially-focused, not business-focused. They concentrate on building an editorial culture to produce great journalism, but don’t create a broader culture of innovation.

Given that strategy often sits with the Product lead by default, most Product leads are optimizing when they should be reinventing, and culture often isn’t addressed at all, how can we redefine Product leadership to include the skills, mandate, resources, and training to bring about real change?

### Newsroom entrepreneurs

After conversations with product and foundation leaders at this year’s [News Product Alliance Summit](https://newsproduct.org/summit), I had an epiphany.

In most newsrooms, the Product lead needs to lead strategy, product, platform, technology, brand, design, and audience; they need to figure out how to build revenue into the offering; they need to be hyper-focused on the underlying needs of the people and communities they’re addressing. In tech, where the Product role originated, product managers are far narrower: they tend to a feature, or even part of a feature. Here, we’re not talking about product managers at all.

Almost a decade ago, I led West Coast investments at Matter, the media startup accelerator. Prior to that, I went through the program myself with my own startup. We backed cohorts of early-stage startups with the potential to be transformative for the media industry. They got a cash infusion, but more importantly, they got a five-month program that was rooted in d.school design thinking but touched on everything from culture to revenue models. That training genuinely changed everything about how I build products and teams.

Not all of the startups succeeded: media is a tough market. But most of the founders who had both received that training and deployed it in service of bringing their businesses to life had gone on to be change-makers elsewhere. The program found people with the right kind of prototype-driven, experimental mindset and a bias towards action and it gave them directed training, a network, and resources. It turns out that people with these traits are valuable — and, if they’re allowed to, can make transformational strides.

Matter alumni include high-level product leaders at companies like Hearst and Snapchat, and even the CTO at the Biden-era HHS. Change-making alumni like [Jenn Brandel](https://jennyeverything.com/) are well-known across journalism. Some have gone on to take big swings like [building hospitals in India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilde%5FGiglio). And I know I couldn’t have led engineering, IT, and security at [ProPublica](https://propublica.org) without everything I learned there.

The Product leaders we need in today’s newsrooms are more like this. They’re not product managers: they’re entrepreneurs. People who can [build their wings on the way down](https://mariachristensen.medium.com/the-ray-bradbury-quote-that-shapes-my-life-cbc5d4bb9006), aren’t afraid to take big risks, have the cross-functional skills to execute, and can forge radically collaborative cultures that are centered on the needs of their communities.

We need them to operate this way, and we should redefine (and potentially rename) our Product lead roles to take this into account. News needs entrepreneurial, wildly experimental, human-centered thinking with a mandate to execute at speed, reporting to and working alongside the CEO. And, for a few rare operators who both have a journalistic background and these entrepreneurial traits, they could *be* the CEO.

The trick is, there aren’t that many people who *can* operate this way in news. So now that we’ve re-scoped the role, the question becomes: how can we make more of them? And how can we make sure they have that mandate and leeway to operate?

[Matter as an accelerator no longer exists](https://matter.vc/its-time-to-flare/), although Columbia University’s [Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program](https://matter.vc/leading-the-sulzberger-program/) shares its leader and much of its DNA. Media executives can learn from the program, and I highly recommend its leader Corey Ford’s [coaching](https://pointc.co) (I’m a happy mentee). But what’s missing from the ecosystem is the experience of building something completely new from the ground up, and the on-the-job experience it provides.

Building a mission-driven startup in media is training-by-fire. With Matter gone, there are very few other opportunities to do it — and very little pipeline for change-making entrepreneurs.

We need that pipeline. So let's build it.

### Building an ecosystem of innovation

This is the first part of a series. In future posts I’ll discuss:

- A proposal for how we might, concretely, build an entrepreneurial pipeline in media
- How we might ensure that newsrooms and media institutions give innovators leeway to work

In the meantime, if this speaks to you, [please reach out](mailto:ben@werd.io); I would love to have a conversation. I’m particularly interested in speaking with people and organizations that have been working on the same problem.