The news industry is entering an era where collaboration is becoming a business necessity. Publishers still compete fiercely for audiences, subscriptions, advertising, and trust. But the biggest challenges facing journalism today, including AI disruption, platform fragmentation, shifting audience behavior, and pressure on business models, are too large for any one organization to solve alone.

That was the core message from Andy Thomson, Executive Director of Business Operations at

Sky News Group, during a session at the recent INMA World Congress in Berlin. Sky News is Europe’s largest media company and pay-TV broadcaster, reaching 23 million subscribers across television, streaming, digital, audio, and social platforms. During his presentation, Thomson argued that the future of journalism will depend not only on how media companies compete, but on how they collaborate.

“Competition sharpens us,” Thomson said. “Collaboration sustains us.” That idea increasingly reflects the reality of modern media.

Sky News’ approach offers practical examples of how media organizations can work together on industry-wide challenges like AI governance, create partnerships that expand audiences and unlock new revenue opportunities, and build workflows designed for a multi-platform world. As publishers look for ways to grow while adapting to rapid change, these lessons provide a useful roadmap for what collaboration can look like in practice.

The challenges facing journalism are shared

“We can compete hard for audiences’ trust and attention,” Thomson explained during the keynote, “whilst also recognizing that some challenges are bigger than any single organization.”

Few examples illustrate this more clearly than AI. News organizations are entering a period where generative AI creates both opportunity and risk simultaneously. AI can improve workflows, increase efficiency, enhance personalization, and expand distribution. It can also weaken attribution, obscure sourcing, commoditize journalism, and accelerate misinformation. These are not isolated challenges. They affect the entire ecosystem.

That reality helped inspire initiatives like SPUR, a coalition involving publishers including the

BBC, Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. SPUR, which stands for Standards, Publishers, and Universal Rights, aims to establish clearer frameworks around transparency, attribution, compensation, and accountability in AI systems.

“This isn’t about limiting competition,” Thomson said. “It’s about transparency, fairness, and accountability.” The distinction matters.

Publishers will continue competing aggressively in the market. But collaboration around standards, rights management, safety, and infrastructure creates a stronger foundation for everyone participating in the ecosystem. Without those shared foundations, sustainable journalism becomes significantly harder to protect.

Collaboration is becoming a growth strategy

Historically, collaboration in media was often viewed defensively. Organizations partnered to reduce costs, share resources, or respond to disruption. Today, collaboration is increasingly tied to growth.

Sky News highlighted several examples during the keynote. One partnership with Tortoise Media combined Sky’s reporting expertise with Tortoise’s strengths in long-form audio storytelling to create The Wargame, a scenario-driven podcast exploring how the UK might respond during a national crisis. The series topped Apple podcast charts for weeks.

Another collaboration brought together political analysis and reporting talent across organizations to create new audience experiences in podcasting. These partnerships worked because each organization contributed distinct capabilities. That model is becoming increasingly important as audience expectations evolve across formats. 

Consumers no longer experience journalism through a single channel. Stories move fluidly between television, websites, podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, newsletters, apps, streaming platforms, and emerging formats still taking shape. No single team or platform can excel everywhere independently.

Collaboration allows organizations to combine editorial expertise, technology capabilities, audience insights, and distribution strategies more effectively. In many ways, the modern newsroom increasingly resembles a connected network rather than a standalone operation.

Platforms are forcing a new operational reality

The fragmentation of audience behavior is also changing how news organizations operate internally. “What works on television doesn’t necessarily work on social or streaming,” Thomson noted. That may sound obvious, but operationally, it represents a massive shift.

Content strategies can no longer be platform-specific afterthoughts. Distribution considerations now influence editorial workflows from the beginning. Product teams, editorial teams, video producers, audience strategists, and technologists all need tighter alignment around how stories are created and experienced across platforms. This requires collaboration inside organizations just as much as outside them.

At Sky News, Thomson described investments in newsroom technologies and workflows designed to help teams think beyond individual outputs and toward multi-platform storytelling ecosystems. That operational flexibility is increasingly tied to business sustainability.

Publishers that can efficiently adapt journalism across formats gain more opportunities to reach audiences where they already are. They also create stronger foundations for monetization across streaming, video, audio, subscriptions, events, and emerging digital products.

Technology partnerships matter more than ever

The growing complexity of modern media operations also explains why technology partnerships are becoming more strategic. Publishers today are balancing legacy infrastructure with rapidly changing audience expectations, evolving business models, and continuous platform disruption. Building every capability independently has become increasingly difficult to justify. The conversation is shifting from ownership to enablement.

Media organizations want technology that helps them move faster, experiment more effectively, and support cross-functional collaboration without creating unnecessary operational friction. That applies across workflows including content management, audience engagement, personalization, video distribution, analytics, and AI integration. The strongest partnerships are not simply vendor relationships. They are collaborative ecosystems built around shared outcomes. This shift reflects a broader truth about the industry’s future. Sustainable growth increasingly depends on interoperability, adaptability, and connected systems rather than isolated tools or closed workflows.