Imagine a newsroom in 2036. What comes to mind?
Wait, no, don't imagine it. Because what you imagine will probably look a lot like the newsroom today, just with some future sprinkled on top.
We are conditioned to think in certain ways, so when we are asked to reimagine something, the result may look new and shiny on the outside while the core remains unchanged. When I started writing this essay, I had a nagging feeling that my vision of the future was not particularly innovative, either. Probably because my idea of a media company was shaped by the ones I already knew. In my writing process, I ended up questioning pretty much everything. What is journalism, anyway? How do we make money ? Who am I ? You see, it got quite deep and existential.
At some point, I had to stop and actually get writing. One draft turned into another. Suddenly, I had five, and I had still not figured it out. With all the scenarios and structures I tried to come up with, I was left feeling... meh.
Then one night, it hit me. The whole problem was that I kept trying to come up with A Solution. But maybe what journalism needs the most right now isn't another brilliant idea for the future, but the curiosity to question the assumptions that shape the ideas we come up with in the first place.
Are we solving the right problems?
In a 2025 essay for Prospect, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen made an observation that has stayed with me: The crisis facing journalism is not necessarily experienced as a crisis by the public. While news organisations worry about declining revenues and changing consumption habits, people are getting on with their lives, finding information and answers elsewhere. They do not necessarily feel that anything is missing.
When young people do not read our articles, we start discussing whether we should make them shorter, turn them into videos or build a new feed. We are already looking for new ways to deliver our traditional journalism without necessarily understanding what people are looking for in the first place. What if the problem isn't the format? What if there are information needs that we are not meeting, barriers we haven't noticed or questions we haven't thought to ask?
We might be so caught up in finding solutions to our problems that we have forgotten to investigate theirs.
Of course, journalism has a democratic responsibility that goes beyond giving people what they ask for. We should investigate what matters, even when the public doesn't know that something needs investigating. But that responsibility should not make us any less curious about the people we are trying to serve. I wonder how many ideas for new journalistic products begin with a genuine understanding of peoples’ needs, and how many begin with an assumption about what will make them consume more of what we already produce.
The value of a stupid question
Let me give you an example from my own organisation. A while back, I suggested using AI to let readers adjust the complexity level of a news article. Journalism can be full of complicated language, institutional references and terminology that assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge. If you do not have that knowledge, reading an article can feel like joining a conversation where everyone else already knows what happened before you arrived. So why not let readers of our journalism adjust the language to something they actually understand?
I raised the idea with journalists and immediately faced objections: What happens to nuance? What if AI changes the meaning? Who takes editorial responsibility for the result? All perfectly legitimate questions. But I will admit that I left those conversations feeling a little stupid, almost as if I had suggested something that went against the very principles of journalism. Which was rather frustrating, when I was only trying to make it more accessible.
Accuracy, nuance and editorial responsibility are not details to ignore in the name of innovation. But making journalism more accessible to people who currently struggle to understand it seems like an important journalistic ambition, too. So why were those ambitions treated as if they were in opposition?
Journalists can become so concerned with protecting editorial integrity that they dismiss technological possibilities too quickly. Developers can become so focused on what technology makes possible that they underestimate the journalistic consequences. Both perspectives are important, but neither should be allowed to end the conversation. The risk is that somewhere in the middle of all these perfectly reasonable professional concerns, and in our hesitation to be thought of as asking stupid questions, we forget the user.
The burden of innovation
Thinking differently is exhausting. When I asked a journalist, who also happens to be a friend, to reflect on these questions with me, he replied, "No, please, Sara. Let's not do that. It gives me a headache."
It is so much easier to do what we have always done. We know how it works, what is expected of us and, more or less, what the outcome will be. Questioning the assumptions behind our work means giving up that certainty. Suddenly, even the things we thought we understood become open questions. And who has the energy - or time - ¨ for that when there are deadlines to meet, stories to publish and a hundred other things demanding our attention?
This is what I think we underestimate when we ask people to innovate. We are asking them to do something that is not only professionally challenging, but also mentally draining. To question what they are good at, to risk getting things wrong and to explore problems without knowing whether they will ever find an answer. And to add to the burden, we often expect them to do all of that on top of their everyday work.
In my master thesis research on innovation in established Nordic media organisations, I found that the problem often wasn't a lack of ideas or ambition. It was the difficulty of creating the time, resources and authority to act on them. When new initiatives compete with everyday operations, everyday operations tend to win. And, why wouldn't they? Existing products have customers, deadlines and measurable results. New ideas come with assumptions, not KPIs. We are asking people to create something unpredictable while judging them by how predictably they deliver.
If we are serious about innovation, we have to make room for the effort it takes. We talk about reimagining journalism at conferences and workshops, but then return to our daily deadlines and the products we already know. If we want to do more than improve what already exists, we need to protect time and resources to question the assumptions we build our work around, and experiment with ideas whose outcomes we cannot yet predict. Even if they never lead to a new product, they might change how we think about journalism itself.
Soft skills, really?
I'm contributing to this anthology alongside people whose work I have followed and admired for years. When I was invited, I was excited. But as I started writing, I also became increasingly nervous. Am I innovative enough? Is any of this interesting? And am I really going to write about all the soft stuff while everyone else is imagining extraordinary technological futures?
At one point, I became so uncertain about my ideas that I didn't even want to show anyone what I had written. Which is slightly ironic, considering that I am writing an essay about the importance of asking questions, challenging assumptions, and being willing to get things wrong. Apparently, it is easier to advocate for those things than to practise them yourself.
As you can see, I did end up sharing my thoughts. And I think a big part of the reason was that I felt safe enough to do so, even when I wasn't entirely confident in what I had to say. But it made me think about all the ideas that never get shared. The questions people do not ask because they are afraid of sounding stupid, or because everyone else in the room seems to know better.
My mentor, Lena K. Samuelsson, reminded me that creating that sense of safety is one of the most important responsibilities of a leader. Because if people do not feel comfortable asking questions, challenging assumptions or admitting that they do not know something, how are we supposed to innovate?
And yet, we often dismiss these things as soft skills, as if they were somehow less important than technological expertise or strategic decisions. But the ability to ask a question without knowing the answer, disagree with someone more experienced or share an idea before it is fully formed can determine which possibilities an organisation ever gets to explore.
Perhaps that is what makes it so difficult. It requires employees to risk being wrong in front of people whose opinions matter to them, and leaders to accept that they do not always know best. But ultimately, it is not just about being willing to listen. It is also about being willing to give up power. Who gets to decide what is worth pursuing, who controls the resources, and who is willing to give up some of that control?
There is a paradox here. The more pressure our industry faces, the more we need to innovate. Yet that same pressure can make us even more protective of our resources, our roles and the influence we already have.
Maybe the things we tend to call soft are actually some of the hardest, and the most important, things to get right as we move towards an AI-mediated future.
The newsroom of 2036 (or at least my attempt)
So, what would actually look like in practice?
I imagine a media organisation where teams of journalists, developers, designers and people with backgrounds we do not traditionally associate with journalism have the time, resources and authority to investigate problems together. Where they are not handed a product brief with a predefined solution to execute, but are encouraged to explore questions that the organisation has not yet figured out how to answer. And where the people we are trying to reach are involved in that exploration, rather than invited in at the end to test whatever we've already decided to build.
My biggest hope is that we will become much better at opening our doors to people who do not look, think or work like the people already inside our newsrooms. Not simply by hiring more diverse talent into the same old structures, but by creating different pathways into journalism and allowing people with different skills and experiences to contribute to its development. If we want people to question the status quo, it seems rather counterproductive to keep recruiting people who have been trained to see the world in the same way.
That also means creating organisations where challenging established ways of working is welcomed rather than treated as an inconvenience. Where people do not have to be brave to ask questions or rely on a mentor to vouch for them when they challenge the status quo. And where leaders actively create the psychological safety that makes those conversations possible, while also giving people the authority to act on their ideas. Because inviting people to think differently means little if we are not willing to share the power to change things.
Most importantly, I would like to see organisations where we are honest about what makes all of this difficult. About our fear of being wrong, our tendency to protect what we have, and the power we might have to give up.
Rewiring ourselves
After five drafts, several existential crises and a fair amount of self-doubt, I am still not able to tell you exactly what the newsroom of 2036 should look like. But what I do know, is this:
In the midst of extraordinary AI agents running future newsrooms, radically reinvented organisational charts or spectacular new business models, here will still be us, our beautiful yet tricky brains, and the phycological work we need to do to allow our businesses to change.