Ed Harrison joins the Insurgent Mindset podcast to discuss how media businesses can survive platform power, AI disruption, and collapsing adjustment cycles
Ed Harrison has spent much of his career watching one media model give way to another. His experience spans Fairfax during the collapse of newspaper circulation, Yahoo7 during the early growth of digital video, iSentia as media monitoring moved into real time, and more recently a medical publishing and data business operating in a market being reshaped again by artificial intelligence.
Across those transitions, one pattern has repeated. New technologies rarely destroy an industry in a single step, but they change customer behaviour, alter distribution and weaken existing economics until the old model becomes difficult to defend. The problem for incumbent businesses is that the shift often looks manageable until the commercial consequences begin arriving much faster than expected.
Ed saw that dynamic during the move from print to digital. Mobile eventually became the decisive force because it changed how and where people consumed information, but the implications were initially easy to underestimate. Publishers had spent decades designing products around large physical pages and were understandably sceptical that a small screen could become the dominant interface for news and information.
The scepticism extended well beyond editorial design. Mobile created an obvious monetisation problem because the advertising real estate was smaller and the economics were less attractive than print. Even within digital businesses, people struggled to see how the medium would become commercially meaningful.
Ed remembers a mobile specialist at Fairfax who attended meetings advocating for the opportunity while being largely ignored. In retrospect, the pattern is familiar: the new model initially looks inferior because it is judged against the strengths of the incumbent model rather than the behaviours it may eventually enable.
Disruption often arrives slowly, then economically
The iPhone launched in 2007, yet Ed believes it took roughly seven years before the publishing industry fully absorbed the commercial importance of mobile. During that period, technology, connectivity and user behaviour were all evolving together.
Video followed a similar path, although publishers arguably reacted too aggressively once they became convinced it represented the future. Editorial teams were reduced, expensive video capabilities were built, and many organisations assumed audiences would increasingly stop reading in favour of watching.
The economics did not always justify the enthusiasm. Publishers had recognised a genuine behaviour change, but many invested ahead of a viable monetisation model.
Ed’s experience suggests that the hardest part of disruption is often not identifying the technology itself, but understanding which parts of the business model it will actually change. Some shifts alter customer behaviour, others change distribution, and still others primarily reduce barriers to entry or weaken pricing power.
The transition to real-time media monitoring at iSentia illustrates that distinction. What had once required substantial infrastructure became easier as content digitised and new competitors could enter without replicating the same fixed-cost base. As barriers fell, pricing power weakened, and the economics of the market changed rapidly.
For Ed, this is one reason leaders should be wary of assuming they will have years to respond simply because previous technology transitions unfolded over long periods. The industry once had something closer to a seven-year adjustment curve around mobile. He does not expect future transitions to provide the same luxury.
Platforms changed distribution, but they also changed power
The rise of Google and Meta transformed publishing not only because audiences migrated towards those platforms, but because revenue followed them. Publishers found themselves increasingly dependent on companies that controlled discovery, audience access, and large parts of the advertising market.
That created an uncomfortable strategic dependency. Publishers needed the platforms because they were increasingly central to audience acquisition, yet every additional layer of platform intermediation weakened the direct relationship between publisher and reader.
Ed sees a renewed focus on direct audience relationships as one of the more important responses to that history. Subscription, email newsletters and first-party data all become more valuable when the alternative is relying predominantly on intermediaries.
The newsletter can appear almost old-fashioned compared with algorithmic distribution or emerging AI interfaces, but Ed regards it as one of the most powerful direct channels available to specialist publishers. In his own business, a weekly doctor newsletter remains a valuable asset because it creates a direct connection with the audience and preserves first-party data.
That direct relationship becomes strategically important because platform dynamics continue to evolve. Publishers are no longer dealing only with search and social distribution. AI increasingly sits above both, answering questions directly and reducing the need for users to click through to the original content provider.
The risk is therefore not simply that another platform takes part of the economics. The greater challenge is that the publisher may lose the audience relationship altogether.
Trust becomes more valuable as content becomes abundant
Ed believes trust is becoming one of the most important assets in publishing, particularly in specialist areas where the consequences of poor information are higher.
The creator economy has dramatically expanded the number of people able to publish. Individuals can build credible communities and strong personal brands, while traditional institutions no longer possess exclusive control over distribution.
Ed does not see this as eliminating the role of trusted publishing brands. Instead, he believes the market is becoming more polarised, with successful businesses clustering around two ends of the spectrum.
At one end are large global publishers with enough scale, uniqueness and brand strength to support subscription and other premium models. At the other are highly specialist publishers serving a narrowly defined audience with distinctive information, expertise or access.
The part of the market under the greatest pressure is the middle. Content that is broadly useful but insufficiently differentiated becomes increasingly difficult to defend because many other providers can produce something similar.
AI intensifies that problem. If the principal value of a publisher is aggregation, then an AI system can increasingly perform the same function by drawing information from multiple sources and synthesising an answer for the user.
For Ed, original content therefore becomes more important rather than less. Publishers need to create information, insight or analysis that would not otherwise exist, because simply curating what is already available leaves them more exposed to disintermediation.
The economics of publishing are moving beyond advertising
The traditional advertising model is also under pressure from several directions. Platforms have captured a large share of advertising expenditure, while publishers face continuing questions about measurement, effectiveness and the value advertisers receive from conventional placements.
Ed is seeing advertisers respond by asking for deeper forms of involvement. The relationship is moving beyond buying space towards partnerships that involve more integrated content, education and audience engagement.
In the medical publishing environment, that increasingly includes webinars, podcasts, supplements, special issues and educational programs. Pharmaceutical companies want to communicate with doctors, but doctors also expect the time they spend engaging with content to produce genuine value.
That changes the nature of the commercial relationship. What might previously have been a transactional advertising purchase becomes a more substantial program of work designed around education and engagement.
Ed also sees data as an increasingly important revenue opportunity. His current business is unusual because data is the primary asset and publishing sits alongside it, whereas many traditional media companies are moving in the opposite direction and trying to build data businesses around existing publishing operations.
The broader pattern is diversification. Smaller publishers in particular may struggle to sustain themselves through subscription alone, while advertising is unlikely to provide the economics it once did. Sustainable models are therefore more likely to combine several revenue streams rather than depend on one.
AI changes both creation and distribution
AI presents a particularly difficult challenge because it affects multiple points in the publishing value chain at once. It can create content, aggregate existing information, influence discovery, and potentially become the interface through which users consume the final answer.
Ed sees a growing risk for publishers if users can obtain what they need directly from an AI system without entering the publisher’s environment. Search at least created the possibility of referral traffic, whereas AI-generated answers may satisfy the user’s need before any click occurs.
That raises a new distribution problem for publishers. Search engine optimisation remains relevant, but organisations are increasingly trying to understand how content should be structured for answer engines and other AI-mediated discovery systems.
Ed is cautious about claiming certainty here because he sees this as an emerging field rather than a settled one. Traditional distribution channels still matter, including search, social media, newsletters, and direct relationships, but AI introduces another layer that publishers are only beginning to understand.
The more profound complication is that AI is not only changing how content is found. It is also changing how much content is produced and what publishers must do to evaluate it.
When AI creates more content, curation becomes harder
Academic and medical publishing provide a particularly visible example. Ed describes a substantial increase in research submissions that are either AI-generated or AI-supported, creating a much heavier workload for editors.
At the Medical Journal of Australia, editorial teams are seeing more submissions while still needing to assess validity, verify references, and ensure that the underlying research meets publication standards. AI can increase the volume of material without increasing the editorial capacity available to evaluate it.
The result is an emerging arms race. AI contributes to content creation, publishers need AI-enabled tools to help triage and verify that content, and AI may ultimately sit again at the distribution end when readers seek answers.
Ed expects some form of equilibrium between human judgment and AI assistance to emerge, but the system has not reached that point yet. Smaller journals are particularly vulnerable because they have fewer resources to invest in the tools required to manage rising volume and maintain quality.
Open access adds another layer of complexity. The model shifts funding from subscriptions towards author payments, making research more widely available but also changing the incentives within academic publishing.
Ed sees a potential problem when revenue becomes more closely linked to publishing volume. If producing more papers generates more income, commercial incentives can begin to move away from the traditional emphasis on quality and trust.
Combined with AI-generated submissions, this can create a difficult feedback loop in which content becomes easier to produce at the same time as parts of the system are financially rewarded for publishing more of it.
Scale changes the balance of power
The copyright and AI-training debate introduces another asymmetry between large and small publishers. Major media organisations have enough scale and influence to pursue legal action, negotiate with platforms or lobby governments over the use of their intellectual property.
Smaller publishers have much less leverage. Ed describes them as effectively being along for the ride because they are rarely in a position to shape the underlying rules of the market.
The same dynamic appears in relationships with large academic publishing partners. Individual journals may rely on global publishers to handle institutional deals, open-access arrangements, and increasingly the terms under which content may be used by AI providers.
For a single journal, the choice can become highly constrained. It may be possible to participate in a broader arrangement under terms established by the larger partner or decline altogether, with relatively little ability to negotiate the middle ground.
That creates a familiar strategic tension for niche publishers. Their specialist content and trusted audience can be highly valuable, but their limited scale can weaken their bargaining power with the platforms and infrastructure providers that increasingly shape distribution.
Respect the legacy business while building the next one
Ed’s experience across several waves of media disruption has left him with a strong view about how leaders should manage incumbent businesses through structural change.
The first principle is to respect the legacy operation. Organisations often become excited about the new model and implicitly treat the existing business as something obsolete that needs to be escaped.
Ed believes that attitude is both unfair and strategically dangerous. The people operating the legacy business are often highly capable and may have spent years building a successful organisation, while the decline they are experiencing is being driven largely by external change rather than poor execution.
The legacy business also frequently funds the transformation. At Fairfax, print could still generate more than 80% of revenue while the organisation was trying to build the digital future, creating a difficult resource-allocation problem.
Moving too aggressively away from the legacy operation can therefore weaken the very source of cash needed to fund the next model. Moving too slowly can leave the organisation stranded when the existing economics finally deteriorate.
Ed’s advice is to manage that balance with respect rather than treating disruption as a simple contest between old and new. Leaders need to help people understand why the organisation is changing while recognising the value of the business that brought it to the current point.
Do not confuse visible innovation with valuable change
A second lesson from Ed’s experience is that organisations can become overly attracted to the most fashionable form of innovation.
Boards, investors and management teams naturally respond to projects that look modern and ambitious. New technologies create compelling presentations and can give organisations a visible story about transformation.
Ed saw this at iSentia, where considerable attention went into new social-media listening tools because they represented the obvious future-facing innovation. Those capabilities mattered, but some of the most valuable improvements came from much less glamorous changes to customer workflows.
The lesson is not to avoid innovation, but to distinguish the visible symbol of transformation from the underlying changes that actually improve the business.
For leaders, that requires a disciplined understanding of where value is created. A relatively mundane process improvement can sometimes produce more commercial impact than the initiative receiving the most attention in the boardroom.
Change has to make sense outside the executive team
Ed also cautions against relying too heavily on the language of strategy and consulting when communicating change through an organisation.
Senior executives can become accustomed to frameworks, board language and complex strategic explanations that make sense within management teams but become increasingly abstract as they travel further into the organisation.
Employees need to understand what is changing, why it is changing and what it means for the work they do. If the explanation becomes dominated by corporate terminology, people may leave transformation meetings more confused rather than more aligned.
Ed therefore favours simplicity. The logic of the strategy may be sophisticated, but the way it is communicated should make the direction understandable to the people expected to implement it.
That principle also reinforces the importance of respect for the legacy business. People are more likely to support a new direction when leaders can explain it without implicitly dismissing the work and capabilities that created the existing organisation.
Move while you still have choices
Ed’s final lesson is the one he sees repeated most consistently across disrupted industries: organisations run out of strategic options faster than they expect.
When revenue begins declining, the problem compounds. Resources become scarcer, employee confidence falls, investment becomes harder and management has fewer choices about what it can realistically change.
At iSentia, falling barriers to entry weakened the company’s moat and reduced pricing power faster than anticipated. Once that economic deterioration gathered momentum, the space available to respond narrowed quickly.
Ed has seen the same underlying pattern across several businesses. The trigger differs, but the sequence is familiar: an external change initially appears manageable, the economics deteriorate faster than expected, and management discovers that decisions that were once discretionary have become constrained by declining resources.
The implication for leaders is not to chase every emerging technology or respond impulsively to every sign of disruption. It is to recognise when the economics of the existing model are changing and act while the organisation still has enough financial strength, capability and confidence to make meaningful choices.
Publishing provides a particularly vivid example because the industry has already moved through print, mobile, platforms, streaming, subscription and now AI. Ed’s experience across those transitions suggests that the specific technologies will continue changing, but the leadership challenge remains remarkably consistent.
Businesses need to understand where trust still creates value, protect direct relationships with customers, build differentiated rather than commoditised offerings, and resist the temptation to equate novelty with progress. They also need to move early enough that transformation remains a strategic choice rather than an emergency response to declining economics.
When the Business Model Changes, How Quickly Can You Respond? Ed Harrison examines the leadership lessons behind decades of media disruption, including how to protect what still creates value, build what comes next, and avoid running out of strategic options.
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