Branko Brkic - Founder Project Kontinuum Branko Brkic, Founder, Project Kontinuum and co-founder of Daily Maverick Branko started Daily Maverick in 2009 with five people and turned it into one of South Africa’s most important newsrooms. In this session he argues that what happened to South African media in the 2010s is now happening everywhere. The big legacy players are still powerful, but slow. The platforms can switch publishers off overnight. And there has been no collect

Helen Philpot - Managing Editor - The Sun Ask a newsroom what 2030 looks like and you'll get a polite silence. Helen Philpot, Managing Editor of The Sun, thinks that's the right answer. In this session of the Emerging Tech Network she makes the case for timing over strategy, explains why adoption is the real barrier to new tech, and gives vendors some fairly direct feedback on how they turn up.

Lucy Alexander - Director Insight and Analytics at the FT Lucy Alexander has spent ten years at the FT doing exactly that. In this session of the Emerging Tech Network she gets into why the metrics that used to matter probably don't anymore, how the FT built a framework that the whole business could actually use, and what happens to the reader relationship when AI starts mediating it for you. This is one of those conversations that sounds like it's about data but is really ab

Louise Ioannou - Publisher Nat Geo Kids & Little Kids What does trust actually mean when your audience is eight years old and their parents are watching everything you do? Louise Ioannou, Publisher of National Geographic Kids, joined the Emerging Tech Network to talk about building a brand that families genuinely believe in, and what that means for every technology decision she makes. This is a rare perspective for tech companies working in media. A publisher who knows exactl

Stephen Jones, Founder of Maro in conversation with Andrew Webb Stephen Jones spent nearly two decades as a working journalist before anyone gave him the data to properly understand whether his work was landing. That experience, building PA Media's analytics function from scratch and learning first-hand how hard it is to make data meaningful to a newsroom, is exactly what Maro is built on. In this session of Stack Sessions, Stephen gets into why publishers are flying blind ac

Robin Booth - Leadership in the Age of AI In this session of the Emerging Tech Network, Robin Booth, outgoing MD of EMAP and incoming CEO of Hemming Group, shares what he's actually learned from leading AI transformation in B2B publishing rather than what sounds good on a slide. The conversation gets into the questions publishers are wrestling with right now. How do you lead change when nobody has a reliable roadmap? When do you build and when do you buy? And what happens to

How do you stay focussed on SEO in the age of AI? Harry Clarkson-Bennett - SEO Director - The Telegraph There's a conversation happening across every newsroom, every boardroom and every publishing leadership team right now. And it sounds something like this: what are we doing about AI? It's a fair question. But Harry Clarkson-Bennett, SEO Director at The Telegraph, thinks we might be asking the wrong one. In this session of the Emerging Tech Network, Harry makes a quietly com

Stack Session - Ludovic Blecher, Partner at WhiteBeard Ludo Blecher has spent 25 years at the sharp end of journalism and media technology from reporter to editor-in-chief at Libération to deploying innovation funding at Google to joining Whitebeard as a Partner. In this first Stack Sessions we get into why publishers can lose the technology battle before they've started, cobbling together disconnected tools that drain budget and create silos. Ludo's answer is an all-in-one

In our recent Emerging Tech Network session, we were joined by Monica Sarkar to explore one of the most pressing questions facing modern newsrooms: how do you earn the attention and trust of the next generation of news consumers? Sarkar, who leads audience strategy work at CNN, shared insight into how news consumption is rapidly shifting away from traditional destinations such as homepages and towards off-platform environments including social media, messaging apps and short-

An interview with Fergus Bell, CEO of Fathm, for the Emerging Tech Network As 2026 unfolds, AI in newsrooms is shifting from shiny experiment to quietly essential infrastructure. In this wide-ranging conversation, Fergus maps how publishers are moving past prompts and pilots towards real integration, harder ROI questions, and uncomfortable business-model truths. Efficiency gains matter, but they’re no longer the endgame. The real opportunity lies in trust, original reporting,