24-25 June, Delhi
| 11:00 | Masterclass: Design Thinking Approach to Data and Engagement. Find answers to help newsrooms connect more effectively with their audiences using data – who our users are, and what are they looking for, and how do we make them come back to us again and again. Learn about building deeper, more sustainable connections with your audiences and preparing to change to make that happen. Vertika Kanaujia, Editorial Operations, Financial Express Digital |
| 17:00 | End of Masterclass |
9.45Opening keynote: Managing media business in the AI-era. AI Marketplace and other latest trends and developments shaping the future of journalism. A forward-looking view of the trends redefining sustainable journalism, and business success in today’s rapidly evolving media landscape.
10.15Roundtable: CEOs of India media companies discuss the challenges in growing digital business, relationship with platforms and their plans for their group leading to 2026 and beyond.
12.15Fireside Chat: India’s AI growth story, and building LLM for India – Strategy for growth, and insights for news media companies navigating this transformative landscape.
14:00 Manorama Online’s premium subscription is an award-winning initiative that has successfully scaled reader revenue in a regional market. This session will highlight key learnings from their strategy, including the adoption of a freemium model, pricing and bundling decisions, and experiments with content scoring, creatives, and conversion optimisation—offering a practical playbook for building a sustainable reader revenue model.
14.30 Sprint session: Digital subscription strategies: What works, what fails and what drives growth. Practical insights on audience engagement, retention, monetisation and building sustainable growth in today’s competitive digital market.
16:00 Marketing news brand to support revenue and audience growth. Hear insights from Prothom Alo’s monetisation strategies and brand initiatives that supports revenue and audience growth.
16.30 Film vertical as a strategic extension for media and entertainment brands to open up new revenue opportunities and expand audience reach. Listen to Mid Day Studio’s real-world experiments in film production, documentaries and web stories, leveraging to build sustainable monetisation models while strengthening brand presence across platforms and audiences.
14:00 How to keep journalism in control in AI-enabled newsrooms. The goal is not to resist AI, but to ensure that technology strengthens — rather than weakens — the core values of journalism: truth, accountability, fairness, and public trust. What should newsrooms be aware of in this new journey.
14:30 AI initiatives at NDTV, leveraging technology for editorial insight and deeper audience engagement. Sneak peek into NDTVs homegrown AI apps for story retrieval and the guardrails that shape the AI usage in the organisation.
15:00 Building robust first-party data and embedding AI across every step of customer and content journey. Practical frameworks, implementation approaches and key learnings on leveraging data and AI to drive personalisation, efficiency, and business growth.
16:00 Sprint session: Preparing for AI & Zero click. How to make our content discovery smarter in AI-led environments. A guided learning session.
9.30Beyond the Banner: Engineering Sustainable Revenue in the AI-driven news era. Digital revenue models are undergoing a structural reset. Legacy banner-led, traffic-driven monetisation is giving way to audience-centric, AI-powered personalisation and deeper engagement strategies. This session explores how publishers can blend subscriptions, advanced advertising, and AI-driven personalisation with scalable video strategies—across short-form, OTT, FAST, and social platforms—to drive growth.
10.00Panel: Digital CEOs discuss the era of traffic to the era of GenAI – How do we manage the new realities of content vs. product and structured access, passive participation vs. active stand and collaborative approach driving business.
11.30A deep dive into evolving social media practices in the era of “zero”, and rapidly changing audience behaviour patterns. Learnings from leading publisher on their social media strategies building relevance, driving engagement, sustaining growth across today’s dynamic social platforms.
12.00Sprint Session: 100 years of journalism through AI-powered archives. This sprint session on HT Labs’ award-winning initiative to transform a century of journalism into a living, intelligent digital archive, deep dives into using large-scale content vectorisation and AI-driven semantic intelligence for unifying decades of reportage, images and editions into a unified searchable Digital Asset Management System. Learnings from this initiative enabling smarter content discovery, reuse, and new editorial, commercial opportunities.
14.30Winning the Next Generation: Strategies of Brut India connecting with young audiences, building trust, and using technology to power growth. Insights from emerging news players—and what they signal for the future of media. (virtual session)
15:00Closing keynote: ARR of USD 400M, half of that in the last one year, Audio storytelling platform is the poster child of Indian media and entertainment. The company has taken content creation to the next level with AI-driven native content and has more than 200,000 content creators from across the world. What makes this growth possible, and what are the secret sauces of growth of the admired company.
