The information landscape is changing once again: generative AI is transforming our relationship to data, discoverability, and content generation; social video and creator economies are reminding me of the early days of blogging; and we’re even rethinking hardware, with voice, AI, and AR interfaces in our glasses, homes, and wrists. Right now, news organizations are thinking carefully about their protective moats, what president of The Economist Luke Bradley has defined as “your areas of real differentiation:”

“The LLM and AI ecology is evolving very, very quickly, and it’s going to be extremely hard for any brand to get a foothold within that ecology,” Bradley said. “Actually, the most important thing is to work out how you must survive outside of that ecology.”

I predict that in 2026, news organizations will get closer to defining their protective moats in a disrupted information landscape. At the same time, this will give them space to start thinking about their bridges, i.e., the different ways news can interface effectively with the new landscape.

In other words, news leaders are moving beyond defining a unique value proposition and also defining a complementary value proposition, naming where journalism, technologies, and in-person ways of building community and sharing information all complement each other.

It helps to take a long view here and, to borrow a page from the Perspectives playbook, I’ve been looking outside the news for inspiration. Taylor Swift, famously, has been releasing multiple copies of vinyls and CDs this year for her albums, but her success is part of a larger industry trend: Indie musicians now operate across vinyl, social video, streaming, and concerts and physical devices, creating products and experiences that build loyal fan followings and engaging experiences amidst the rapid disruptions of technology.

Streaming, to be clear, remains dominant. But, over two decades after the first iPod, it looks like a world of musical abundance on streaming services has only increased the value of community, physicality, a unique voice, and in-person experiences. As The Observer noted, “Digital lives feel wobbly, insubstantial. We want the heft of things we can hold in our hands, and with which we can form an emotional connection.” While it once felt like we would see a total transformation and embrace of digital technologies in society, what we’re seeing, especially with new generations, is a deeper appreciation of the physical world and tangible, in-person experiences.

But this isn’t a story of digital and physical existing in opposition; it’s a story of how they work together. Consider the return of bookstores and physical books, which were supposed to have gone to the wayside thanks to e-readers and online sellers, some two decades ago. One big driver is social video: BookTok has revived an interest in discussing, collecting, and flipping through physical books.

And another example is chess, one of the earliest fields of human creativity to be disrupted by AI. In 1996, grandmaster Garry Kasparov famously lost to IBM’s Deep Blue. It initially felt like the death of chess, but instead, the game has only grown in popularity over the past 30 years, and it’s now even considered cool. AI and the internet enabled people to learn quickly and receive regular coaching, combining the human qualities of creativity and strategy with the tactical and computational advantages of AI.

Amara’s Law is a foresight principle that helps us understand these longer-term, decades-long trends. According to Roy Amara, we tend to overestimate the immediate impact of a new technology and underestimate its long-term effects. And when we take the long view, technological disruptions are often much more complex and surprising than initially predicted. (And like I wrote last year, we can’t predict the future, but we can plan for it.)

So what does all this mean for news? We can see signals of this coming world with a variety of bridges that connect news to technology, community, and in-person experiences: as Josh Stearns wrote for Local News Lab, events-based journalism complements the rapid, bite-sized nature of algorithmic social media by satisfying a hunger for community. Events like Mirror Indy’s Chat n Chew series bring this to life with biweekly gatherings of journalists, community members, and leaders in Indianapolis.

As Adriana Lacy has noted, influencer-led news can complement each other through trust, relationships, and authenticity, and efforts like Project C are helping facilitate the connections. Nikita Roy has observed how AI-augmented news discovery tools complement the human capacity for storytelling with the machine capacity for sifting through reams of data for important patterns, and tools like DataTalk at Big Local News are bringing this to life for investigative journalists.

And this year, at the outstanding Future of Nonfiction Video summit led by Video Consortium, I saw the worlds of creators, local news leaders, documentary filmmakers, and technologists coming together to imagine and build bridges across fields once considered very different from each other. At the NPA Summit’s first in-person summit, product leaders pointed to advertising, community, and AI as part of the evolving news product landscape.

The future of our industry is complex, and it will require time, patience, and strong stomachs to navigate the changes to come. We can look to vinyls, books, and chess, all of which seemed to have seen their final days because of new technologies, only to be totally transformed, reimagined, and revived. It wasn’t just the moats that made them more powerful. It was the bridges.