The year news gets personalized (seriously)

Every year since approximately the invention of the iPad, someone predicts that this — finally! — will be the year of personalization. And usually that means: “We’ll use cookies to figure out you like politics, and put more politics articles at the top of your feed.”

For the last decade, our industry has viewed personalization as a sorting problem, shuffling our cards to match a user’s interests. But the journalism itself? Well, that hasn’t really changed since…well, ever.

But in 2026, we’re going to stop personalizing the menu and start personalizing the meal.

The first phase will be the “easy” stuff, mostly personalization of format. If you’re a commuter, you get the audio summary that lasts the exact length of your train ride. If you tend to spend the working day in your inbox, you get the newsletter bullet points. If you’re a devoted flicker, you get the vertical video.

But the second phase is where it gets exciting. This is the personalization of our storytelling.

Imagine a single scoop, simultaneously filed in four distinct ways:

• The Investor: Gets the market-moving data up top, red arrows, and raw numbers.
• The “Afraid I Haven’t Caught Up in a While”: Gets the necessary background and context first, then the news.
• The Empath: Gets the same story, led with a human case study or narrative profile.
• The Absolute Expert: Gets a cut-to-the-chase version — new facts only, no fluff.

This has always been a pipe dream for most: it would have required a newsroom the size of a small nation to rewrite every story four times. But now we have AI agents that can act as the infinite sub-editor, remixing the raw reporting into these bespoke experiences on the fly.

And it will require a fundamental shift in how we actually do the work. Perhaps a reporter files a single, polished megastory that contains every building block you’d need for any version of the piece. Perhaps, for some stories, we actually file in those building blocks. Reporters will submit facts, quotes, context, data, as separate atomic units.

In many ways, we have to start thinking about this anyway. If we want our journalism to be retrievable by the large language models that are fast becoming the internet’s operating system, our content needs to be structured data, not just blobs of text.

Does this mean the death of the beautifully written narrative feature? Obviously not. In a world of commoditized, atomized facts, the handcrafted, human-led narrative becomes the ultimate premium product: the vinyl record in the age of Spotify (kind of).

But as facts become cheaper and infinitely replicable, the specific product experience — how we present those facts to you specifically — becomes the most powerful moat we have left. 2026 is the year we start digging it.