Powerful programme takes final shape

Just announced – Etienne Mélou, Long-Form Editor-in-Chief, Brut

Video news platform Brut, ten years old this year, was named a pioneer in “creator-type approaches to news” in the Reuters Institute 2025 Digital News Report. Etienne Mélou joined Brut almost three years ago, as the platform was expanding its long-form content strategy. He helped structure and develop this editorial area and is now the platform’s  Long-Form Editor-in-Chief and Producer. In this role, he leads long-form production and works with journalists and creators to develop new narrative formats for digital platforms for Brut and other partners.

Meet your emcee: Ros Atkins, BBC News

Before getting to the sessions, we’ll like to introduce you to Ros Atkins, BBC News Analysis Editor and co-presenter of The Media Show on BBC Radio 4, who will serve as Congress emcee on opening day. He’s best known for his Ros Atkins On… explainer videos – short, fact-dense, forensic – which have become a global phenomenon with hundreds of millions of views. He’s also the author of The Art of Explanation and the founder of the BBC’s 50:50 Project, a data-driven initiative to improve gender representation in journalism that has since expanded to over 130 organisations in 30 countries.

AI in the newsroom: new practitioners on stage

Olalla Novoa Ojea, Director of AI at PRISA Media, leads one of the most ambitious AI programmes in European media – at a group whose brands include El País, Cadena SER (radio) and Diario AS (sports). Her work ranges from building synthetic brand voices to developing VerificAudio, an award-winning tool to detect audio deepfakes, to signing a content deal making PRISA the exclusive Spanish-language news provider for ChatGPT. She speaks in AI: What the latest developments mean for publishers and newsrooms – a pre-congress deep dive workshop on Monday morning exploring what the current wave of AI development actually means in practice for media leaders, strategy and business models.

Jonathan Levy has been Managing Director and Executive Editor of Sky News UK since 2023, responsible for journalism across digital, TV and audio for more than 500 journalists – with over 20 years at Sky. He has become an increasingly prominent voice on editorial leadership, journalist wellbeing and the human cost of running newsrooms through sustained disruption. Alongside Jane Barrett (Head of Reuters AI Strategy at Reuters) and Fabrice Bakhouche (CEO of Sipa–Ouest-France), he speaks in Managing complexity and motivation through disruption – Tuesday’s session on how today’s most effective media executives are bringing their whole organisations with them through sustained, multi-front change. The focus is on the human side of disruption: keeping managers motivated, teams agile and organisations focused when AI and the creator economy keep shifting the ground beneath them. It’s a subject Levy knows from the inside – he has spoken publicly about the toll that relentless upheaval takes on journalists, and the kind of leadership that actually helps.

Pundit Sriram is CPO at the Hindu Group. The group’s introduction of a successful Q&A feature in their app, launched last year, has dramatically increased app engagement. The increased personalization driven by AI and the Q&A summaries model has been a major factor in the company’s growth of app revenue. Sriram speaks in Tuesday’s AI track session Product visions for navigating disruptive change, where we’ll hear from leading product executives on how the role is evolving: what they’re building differently, where they’re using AI to move faster, and how they’re holding the line on what matters most.

Markus Knall is Chief Editor and Director Content at Ippen Digital – Germany’s leading digital publisher with over 80 news portals reaching more than 300 million visits per month. He built Ippen’s unified national editorial structure that serves dozens of local and national brands from a single team. He speaks in How AI is Transforming the News Experience – Wednesday’s session examining what’s actually working when it comes to AI-powered products and reimagined audience experiences. For a publisher like Ippen, serving communities across 80+ local and regional portals, the promise of “liquid content” that adapts to context and AI that allows local publishers to radically expand their coverage is not theoretical – it’s a strategic challenge.

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The emerging media ecosystem built on communities and trust – meet your new potential partners

The media ecosystem is being reshaped – not just by AI, but by a generation of platforms and players that are building powerful environments where the community, trust and monetisation operate outside traditional media structures. This session brings together four of those players, allowing us to explore their ambitions, learn how they see their place in the ecosystem, and consider what meaningful collaboration with established news organisations could look like in practice. We’ve now confirmed these additional speakers – from Reddit, Substack and Rebuild, Europe’s new effort to build European social platforms:

Renée Kaplan arrives at this session with a CV that crosses some of the most consequential fault lines in modern media. After leading digital editorial development at the Financial Times and heading up news at ARTE, she has just joined Substack as its first Head of Partnerships for France – tasked with building direct relationships between writers, journalists and their audiences outside the algorithm. Few people in Europe understand the gap between institutional media and the emerging direct-to-reader economy better.

Thomas Madsen-Mygdal is a Danish internet pioneer who co-founded one of Europe’s first internet companies in the 1990s and later built Podio (acquired by Citrix). He now leads Rebuild, an NGO backed by European entrepreneurs and patronised by former EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, on a 12-month sprint to catalyse a new generation of European social platforms – built on European values rather than US platform logic.

Gabriel Sands is News & Lifestyle Business Development Partnerships Lead at Reddit, where he connects publishers to a network of over 100,000 communities and helped introduce Reddit’s first-ever suite of tools for publishers. With over a billion users generating deeply engaged, topic-driven conversations, Reddit represents something unique: unscalable trust at enormous scale.

What does a winning media strategy actually look like right now? Some of the industry’s top executives share theirs

The closing plenary on Wednesday brings together some of the industry’s most forward-thinking leaders to discuss how they are reshaping strategies and business models in an era transformed by AI. Two newly confirmed speakers join an already formidable lineup that includes Almar Latour (CEO, Dow Jones & Publisher, The Wall Street Journal) and Goli Sheikholeslami (CEO, POLITICO).

Pia Rehnquist is Head of Bonnier News Local and will be moderating the session. BNLO is Sweden’s largest local newspaper group with nearly 50 titles and close to 500,000 subscribers, of which over 60% are now digital. She is one of the clearest voices in European media on local news sustainability and digital transformation – having overseen a shift from 20,000 to more than 300,000 digital subscribers over the past decade, while the group expects digital revenues to overtake print in 2027. 

Rainer Esser led Die Zeit Verlagsgruppe for 27 years – stepping down as CEO in February 2026 after transforming one of German-speaking Europe’s most respected media brands from a traditional weekly into a thriving multi-platform business. Under his leadership, revenues quadrupled, digital subscriptions grew strongly, and the group diversified into magazines, education, events and digital job marketplaces. His legacy as a quality media executive in Europe gives him the freedom to speak frankly about where the industry goes next.