Three Publishers, Three Digital Paths: How the Industry Is Writing Its Own Playbook

In the early 2010s, Mark Nienhueser watched a lot of small-town newspapers miss the digital wave. He had spent years selling online platforms to local service businesses, and when he moved to the Missouri Press Association in 2013, he saw something that frustrated him: newspapers that had spent generations connecting communities were suddenly struggling to connect with their own digital futures.

"Newspapers had a bad reputation for not getting into the digital side of things—and for the most part, that was true," Nienhueser told the Reynolds Journalism Institute. About 175 weekly newspapers in the Missouri Press Association were the ones feeling the pressure most acutely; the daily papers were doing "OK with digital ad sales," but the smaller weeklies were, as he put it, the ones that were struggling.

What Nienhueser built next became a model that would travel beyond Missouri—a way of bundling digital tools for advertisers who had never been able to afford the kind of campaigns that national brands took for granted. It is one thread in a much larger story about how publishers, from independent weeklies to national outlets, are finding—or failing to find—their footing in a world where the rules keep changing.

The Local Path: Turning Small Packages Into Sustainable Revenue

The problem Nienhueser identified was not that small businesses did not want to advertise digitally. It was that the digital ad world had been built for large clients. The minimum buys, the CPMs, the reporting dashboards—all of it assumed a client with a marketing department and a budget to match.

"Most of the digital ad world was geared toward large clients, not smaller local businesses," according to the RJI report on small-town print going digital. What Nienhueser envisioned was an easy-to-use platform where newspapers could offer their advertisers simple digital solutions—Facebook pages, basic websites, display ads—at prices that made sense for a local restaurant, a neighborhood dentist, or a hardware store.

He worked up proposals and caught the attention of Roger Gafke, then the retired program development director for the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. Gafke suggested it might make a good RJI Fellows project. Nienhueser applied, and in 2015 he became an RJI Fellow.

The breakthrough came when he connected with Amplified Digital, a St. Louis ad agency. For $1,400, an advertiser could buy 2.5 million views. The platform drove higher volumes to the member papers, and the press association took a percentage off the top. It was a simple structure, but it worked because it matched the scale of the advertisers to the reach of the publications.

Nienhueser took the program on the road, pitching other press associations. Arkansas, Alabama, Kansas, and Mississippi came on board. "They totally got where I was coming from—they understood the small packages and that there was margin there," he said. The key was getting member newspapers to understand the value of the new opportunity. Using money from his fellowship, Nienhueser hired a salesman and went out to member papers, talking through the pitch.

The model is not glamorous. It does not involve venture capital, viral newsletters, or the kind of subscriber growth that makes headlines. But it is concrete, it is local, and it addresses a real gap in the market—the fact that the vast majority of businesses in the United States are small enterprises that have been largely invisible to digital advertising's promise. For publishers who know their communities intimately, it offers a way to monetize that relationship in the language that local businesses actually speak.

The Values Path: Building a Co-operative Around What Readers Care About

Three thousand miles and an ocean away from Missouri, another publisher was asking a different question: not just what digital tools to offer, but what readers actually want from journalism in the first place.

Positive News launched in the UK in 1993, but its current chapter began in 2016 when it relaunched as a magazine after becoming a co-operative. The brand sold community shares, and 1,500 audience members became co-owners. That initial capital—raised from the readers themselves—gave the organization room to build.

"That gave us some capital to grow, and so we invested that over about five years and developed a more sustainable and resilient business model," said Sean Wood, chief executive of Positive News, in an interview with Press Gazette. The model centers on reader revenue: subscriptions to the print magazine—which has 10,000 paying subscribers—and a Guardian-style supporter scheme through which online users make monthly recurring donations. There is also some branded and sponsored content, but the core is direct reader support.

The numbers are modest by industry standards but striking in their growth trajectory. The website attracts around 500,000 visits per month, according to Similarweb data cited in the Press Gazette report. The weekly email newsletter has 83,000 subscribers. In the 2025/26 financial year, operating revenue grew 7% year on year, and the publisher made a small surplus—results Wood described as "tough" in the independent journalism market but worth noting for a seven-person team that has "continued to grow slowly, which we're proud of."

What makes Positive News particularly interesting right now is what it is doing next. Having established an effective sustainable business model, the team is now asking a harder question: how do you scale something built on reader trust without losing what makes it work?

The key, Wood said, is protecting the direct relationship with the audience—editorially and financially. Financial supporters currently receive perks like exclusive email updates, 10% off the magazine, and invitations to an annual "inspiration meeting." But Wood acknowledged that they "don't give a lot tangibly back" to supporters.

That is the gap Positive News is now trying to fill. The outlet has launched a major project to understand what readers actually care about, asking audiences what they would be willing to pay for as it considers introducing a membership scheme. It is also surveying readers about their values—an attempt to match journalism to what people most care about, a framework the outlet calls "values-aware journalism."

The approach is essentially the inverse of the digital ad bundle model. Where Nienhueser built a platform to serve advertisers, Positive News is building a structure around readers. The question is whether listening to audiences about values can produce journalism that is both financially sustainable and substantively different from what readers could get elsewhere. Early signals suggest the answer might be yes—but it requires an ongoing commitment to asking rather than assuming.

The AI Path: Licensing Deals in an Uncertain Market

If the local and values-based models are exercises in creative adaptation, the emerging AI content licensing market represents something more like a structural reckoning—one that publishers did not choose but cannot ignore.

In May 2026, the Open Markets Institute released a report titled Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths: Mapping the AI Content Licensing Market. The report, authored by Courtney Radsch and Karina Montoya from the institute's Center for Media and Digital Governance (formerly the Center for Journalism and Liberty), maps out the emerging landscape of content licensing deals between publishers and AI companies. Its central finding is uncomfortable: publishers are caught in what the authors call a "double bind."

"The same big tech companies that are developing commercial AI products and stripping news publishers of site traffic are the ones dictating what alternative revenue will look like," reported Andrew Deck for Nieman Journalism Lab. "Big Tech is occupying both sides of the value chain simultaneously."

The mechanism is well-established: most commercial AI products use retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to scrape news publications and retrieve up-to-date information in order to answer user queries. This drives traffic away from publisher websites while using publisher content to train and power AI products that compete with those same sites.

What is new is the emergence of content licensing marketplaces that attempt to create a revenue stream from this arrangement. Startups like Sphere, ScalePost, Defined, and TollBit have entered the space, building infrastructure that allows publishers to earn money when AI companies crawl their content. Cloudflare, which services about 20% of global web traffic, launched a "pay-per-crawl" marketplace last summer, enabling publishers to set rates for AI bot access. In February, Microsoft announced its Publisher Content Marketplace, which follows a "pay-per-use" model allowing publishers to sell rights-cleared content at set prices.

But the intermediaries take a cut. ScalePost takes roughly 15% of revenue earned by rights holders. The Open Markets Institute estimates, based largely on stakeholder interviews, that Cloudflare is taking about 30%. ProRata.ai, another startup in the space, is developing its own model, but the pattern is consistent: the new infrastructure that is supposed to save publishers is already extracting a significant share of whatever it generates.

The stakes go beyond current revenue, the report argues. "The deal structures, price precedents, intermediary take rates, and governance norms taking shape now will be difficult to revise once they are normalized," Radsch and Montoya write. "The question of whether publishers, journalism, or creators of any sort can make a credible collective claim before market structures crystallize will not stay open indefinitely."

Three Models, Three Lessons

What emerges from these three paths is not a single answer but a set of honest questions about what publishers are actually selling—and who they are selling it to.

The local digital ad model works because it matches supply to demand at a scale that makes sense for both parties. Weeklies that have covered their communities for decades have relationships that national platforms will never replicate. When you bundle those relationships with simple digital tools, you create something that a local bakery or a neighborhood mechanic can actually use.

The co-operative model works because it treats reader trust as the core asset rather than a byproduct of page views. By asking audiences what they value—literally surveying them about their values—Positive News is trying to build a product that reflects its readers back to themselves. The risk is that listening too closely to existing audiences can limit editorial ambition; the opportunity is that a publication that genuinely reflects its readers has something no algorithm can replicate.

The AI licensing path is different in character. It is not really a strategy so much as a response to a structural reality that publishers did not create and cannot control alone. The deals being struck now will set precedents for years. The intermediaries taking 15% to 30% of revenue are building the infrastructure that publishers will depend on—or be constrained by. The Open Markets Institute report makes clear that this moment is not just about current revenue but about governance—who sets the terms, who has leverage, and whether publishers can act collectively before the market crystallizes.

What Publishers Actually Control

Looking across these three cases, a pattern emerges: the publishers who are finding traction are the ones who have identified what they actually control and built around that.

Nienhueser did not try to compete with Facebook or Google. He identified a gap—small businesses that wanted digital exposure but could not afford national-scale campaigns—and built a platform that connected those businesses to local papers that had the audience but lacked the tools. The press association model gave him scale; the partnership with Amplified Digital gave him technology; the fellowship gave him time. What he did not do was pretend that newspapers could become tech companies.

Positive News did not try to compete with major national outlets on volume or breaking news. It identified a specific editorial niche—rigorous journalism about what is going right—and built a business model around readers who cared about that mission enough to become co-owners. The co-operative structure gave it stability; the values survey is giving it direction. What it is not doing is pretending that growth is more important than sustainability.

The AI licensing situation is harder because publishers are not in control of the core technology or the market structure. But even there, the Open Markets Institute report suggests that collective action—publishers acting together rather than individually—is the only way to gain meaningful leverage. The deals being struck in 2026 will shape what journalism looks like in 2036. That is a stakes publishers need to grapple with, even if the path forward is not yet clear.

Where the Reuters Institute Fits

To understand the broader context in which these three models are operating, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University offers annual benchmarking data through its Digital News Report. While the full report tracks subscription trends, trust metrics, and platform behavior across dozens of countries, the underlying theme is consistent: print publishers are navigating a shift where their historical advantages—brand trust, local knowledge, community relationships—matter, but where the rules of engagement are being rewritten by forces outside their control.

The Reuters Institute's research on public service broadcasting in a digital world offers another useful frame. Public broadcasters face similar challenges to publishers—maintaining relevance, serving younger audiences, adapting to platform economics—though with different institutional constraints. The lessons are not identical, but the underlying question is the same: how do you maintain editorial mission when the business model that supported it is no longer stable?

What This Means for ReadersOpinions Readers

If you are a reader who cares about books, authors, and the culture that surrounds them, these three publisher stories matter for a straightforward reason: the publications that cover your interests depend on business models that are still being invented. The local weekly that reviews your town's literary festival, the independent outlet that profiles debut novelists, the magazine that runs long-form interviews with writers you admire—each of these is making decisions right now about how to survive the digital transition.

Understanding the different paths publishers are taking helps you understand what you are actually supporting when you subscribe, donate, or share a link. A local ad bundle model means the paper is betting that small businesses in your community value local journalism enough to advertise alongside it. A co-operative model means the readers are the owners, which changes the incentive structure in ways that can serve long-term editorial quality. An AI licensing deal means the publication is accepting a complicated trade-off—some revenue now, in exchange for terms that may constrain future options.

None of these models is inherently better than the others for every publication in every context. What matters is whether the model matches the publication's mission, its audience's actual needs, and the realities of the market it operates in. As a reader, your attention and your dollars are part of that calculation. Understanding how the math works helps you make choices that align with the journalism you want to see survive.

Three Paths, One Unknown

The honest answer is that no one knows which of these models will prove most durable—or whether the durable model of 2036 has not been invented yet. What is clear is that publishers who are doing interesting work right now are the ones who have stopped trying to be something they are not.

Mark Nienhueser did not try to make weeklies into digital natives. He found the gap between what local businesses needed and what local papers could offer, and built a bridge. Positive News did not try to compete with the Guardian or the BBC. It found the readers who wanted what it was already doing, and built a structure around that relationship. The publishers navigating AI licensing deals are operating in genuinely uncharted territory, but the Open Markets Institute's report suggests that collective action—publishers acting together rather than individually—offers the best chance of shaping terms rather than simply accepting them.

The Reuters Institute's annual data will track which approaches are gaining ground and which are stalling. The Nieman Journalism Lab will continue covering the AI licensing landscape as it develops. Press Gazette will follow Positive News's values survey and membership experiment. The RJI will document how the digital ad bundle model travels to new states and new contexts.

For now, the picture is one of genuine experimentation—messy, uneven, and far from settled. That is probably the most honest thing that can be said about publishing's digital reckoning. The industry is not dying. It is improvising. And the results, for readers who care about where books and authors are discussed, are worth watching.

Where to Read Further

• The full RJI report on Mark Nienhueser's digital ad bundle model, including details on the partnership with Amplified Digital and the press association rollout across multiple states.
• Press Gazette's coverage of Positive News's values survey and membership experiment, with Sean Wood's full remarks on the co-operative model and audience listening strategy.
• The Open Markets Institute report, Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths: Mapping the AI Content Licensing Market, analyzed by Andrew Deck at Nieman Journalism Lab, including details on Cloudflare, Microsoft, ScalePost, and the revenue splits that are already taking shape.
• The Reuters Institute's research on print media challenges and opportunities, offering broader benchmarking context for subscription, trust, and platform trends.
• The Reuters Institute's analysis of public service broadcasting in a digital world, which addresses parallel questions about institutional adaptation and audience relevance.