This week, Business Insider, part of Axel Springer’s media empire, announced it will lay off ~21% of its staff as it pivots toward artificial intelligence and live events. In a memo to employees, CEO Barbara Peng described an urgent need to adapt: “Business models are under pressure, distribution is unstable, and competition for attention is fiercer than ever,” she wrote, pointing to a “huge opportunity for companies who harness AI first.”

The shake-up will touch every department and includes ending most of Insider’s e-commerce (“commerce”) operations and cutting some traditional beats, while reducing reliance on traffic-dependent content. At the same time, Insider plans to launch a new event series called “BI Live” to showcase its journalism, even hiring new staff to run those live events. 

“Change like this isn’t easy,” Peng acknowledged, recalling that Insider was born in a time of disruption, when the smartphone was reshaping how people consumed news. We thrived by taking risks and building something new. Now, she’s positioning AI as the next disruptive leap Insider must embrace to “lead the pack.”

Peng’s optimism aside, the news has understandably rattled journalists inside and outside Insider. The company’s union said roughly 20% of its members will lose their jobs and blasted the cuts as another “brazen pivot away from journalism toward greed” by Axel Springer. 

Union leaders also called it “tone-deaf” that management touted “going all-in on AI” in the very memo announcing mass layoffs. (Indeed, it’s a jarring juxtaposition: on the same day Insider extolled AI’s promise, many human staffers received pink slips.) Insider had already trimmed about 10% of staff last year, and its parent company is highly profitable, facts not lost on critics of these cuts.

So what does this mean for the broader journalism industry? In short: AI has graduated from buzzword to strategic centerpiece and newsrooms must grapple with that reality. Insider’s move is one of the clearest signals yet that major publishers see AI not just as a tool, but as a core part of their business strategy (for better or worse). They’re hardly alone. Just this week, The New York Times struck a deal to license its content to Amazon for “AI-related uses,” allowing Times journalism to be shared via Alexa and even to train Amazon’s AI models. 

Other big media players have inked similar agreements: News Corp has a content deal with OpenAI, The Associated Press and Axel Springer (Insider’s owner) have partnered with OpenAI as well. In Insider’s case, the company is also diversifying revenue by leaning into live events (a growing trend for publishers) while using AI to streamline operations. It’s a dramatic play, but it reflects pressures felt across newsrooms everywhere to find sustainable business models in a changing digital economy.

Crucially, this pivot does not need to spell doom and gloom for journalism, unless the industry stays flat-footed. Yes, the specter of AI displacing jobs is scary. But as observers have pointed out, journalism has weathered waves of technological change before (from the web, to social media, to smartphones) and come out stronger.

The key is adaptation, not panic. As Poynter’s Alex Mahadevan noted after a recent AI and Journalism summit, the question is whether this moment is a “doomsday scenario, or will it spark a reinvention?”

The opportunity now is for journalists and newsroom leaders to proactively shape how AI is implemented, rather than having it imposed top-down. That means developing clear ethical guidelines and workflows for AI in reporting, making transparency to audiences a priority, and identifying where these tools can augment newswork (data analysis, research, personalizing content) versus where human judgment must remain paramount. Notably, audiences want newsrooms to proceed with caution: a recent study found most Americans want news organizations to disclose their use of AI and set ethical policies before integrating the tech. In other words, media organizations should be openly engaging with their readers about AI and demonstrating how it can serve quality journalism, not undermine it.

Rather than viewing Insider’s AI pivot as a herald of an AI apocalypse, it may be better seen as a wake-up call. Forward-looking news leaders will use this moment to invest in AI literacy and training in their newsrooms, set guardrails (many news unions are already pushing for this), and explore new products that leverage AI to enhance storytelling and audience engagement all while fiercely protecting the integrity of their journalism. We’re already seeing early examples: at Politico, journalists negotiated some of the first contract language governing AI in a newsroom, and they’re now taking management to task for allegedly violating those rules by rolling out new AI tools without consent.

This kind of push-and-pull is healthy. It shows that reporters and editors are not passive bystanders but are actively insisting on a seat at the table in how AI gets used. There’s bound to be tension and trial-and-error (see the Sun-Times’ recent AI fiasco in our reading list below), but outright resistance or panic could leave journalists sidelined. The better path is to engage, experiment and lead. If AI is going to reshape how news is produced, distributed, and monetized, who better than journalists themselves to help guide that transformation in service of truth and the public interest?