NZME built a national attention business from newspapers, radio towers, podcasts and property listings. Its advantage is not one blockbuster brand, but the ability to meet the same New Zealander at breakfast, during the commute and on the hunt for a home.
Everyone else sold their libraries and chased prestige drama. The Murdochs kept the loud, live stuff - news and football - and it is quietly minting money.
Lucky Gunasekara is the co-founder and CEO of Miso.ai, an AI media lab that builds private answer engines for news publishers and learning platforms. A trained interaction designer who once built an RSS crawler to track global disease outbreaks, he now partners with 45-50+ publishers worldwide on what he calls 'liquid content' - adaptive, machine-readable information that pays royalties back to the writers and sources it draws from. His pitch to the news industry is blunt: AI is an asteroid coming for all of us, so we had better get to dinner and figure it out together.