Report

Newspaper execs open up about their biggest regrets

By David Grant

January 31, 2026

This article originally appeared on Blue Engine Collaborative’s LinkedIn.

Experience is a fantastic teacher – and America’s newspaper executives have some hard-won lessons for their peers led by needing to make faster investments in digital growth.

This month, Blue Engine Collaborative and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism surveyed ~50 American newspaper executives in our second Newspaper Executive Insights poll. (See the first poll on newspapers’ pursuit of philanthropy in 2026 here).

This month, we offered a question suggested by William “Stacey” Cowles, publisher of the Spokesman Review:

“What’s the one change you’ve made that you wish you’d done sooner?”

The results broke down into three major areas where leaders felt they waited too long to make a move.

The number one response? Making earlier investments in digital publishing.

Nearly half the respondents shared that they wish they would’ve “embraced the digital components of publishing” sooner, as one midwestern executive put it. “Although we are not seeing revenues increases we hoped for, it has increased awareness throughout our communities.”

The exact investments that publishers wished they’d have made sooner varied:

• Some mentioned technological changes, like moving their CMS to a “truly digital system” on a new platform, as one northeastern executive put it.
• Some mentioned adding investments in new positions around audience development, with budgets to match. “Investing more time and money in our audience development initiatives [is leading to] 5% year-over-year digital subscription growth in our markets,” said a western newspaper executive.
• “We have significantly increased digital subscriber, online engagement and reader interface satisfaction” through our mobile app, said Isaiah Buse , publisher of the Houston Herald. “We have also grown our younger audience demographic.”
• Others mentioned wanting to have moved faster into email newsletters or podcast products.

Finally, one respondent mentioned that their operation is vastly benefitting from AI copy editing.

“One change I wish we’d made sooner is incorporating AI into our copy-editing process. Our reporters now self-edit using an approved AI prompt before filing stories to a human editor,” one southeastern executive said. “That step has reduced avoidable errors and allowed our editors to spend more time on higher-value work — strengthening story structure, sharpening headlines and focusing on news judgment rather than basic cleanup.”

Across the board, however, the response was clear: even if immediate results varied, making the plunge into new digital products and audience growth was the #1 response for executives taking a clear-eyed view of the past.

Making these investments leads directly into the survey’s second insight: don’t agonize over personnel changes.

In the best case, restructuring can lead to growth.

The Santa Fe New Mexican “restructured people and funding resources and shifted more focus and investment into our subscriber retention and acquisition engine,” said Patrick Dorsey, the organization’s publisher.

“By the end of 2025 our total paid subscriptions reached net positive year-over-year and we are entering 2026 in a growth trajectory. We minimized print losses and aggressively grew digital while also increasing our net average revenue per user (ARPU) for both. This helped overcome weaker areas in the business and allow us to further increase investments in 2026. We are also leveraging our learning from the paid subscriber engine to assist with our donor nurturing and growth on the philanthropic side,” Dorsey said.

In a more challenging case, making hard calls about changes to structure and talent is a necessary step to future growth.

“We have to have team members that not only get the job done, but also believe in a similar vision for the future of local news,” as one southeastern newspaper executive said. “Moving slowly in this regard only delays progress.”

Vitally, these adjustments allow  “a place for new talent to emerge and for the community to see changes happening in real time,” said the southeastern executive. “Often, there’s some trepidation at first, but then it quickly subsides and true progress can happen.”

This insight rhymed with our final major point: the reflection that simplifying your operation can never come soon enough.

Whether in the financial savings of moving to fewer print days per week or consolidating titles (“lots of savings, minimal reader impact,” as one midwestern executive put it) several respondents noted that driving for simplicity paid strong dividends.

Here are a few other ideas mentioned by poll respondents:

• Creating a nonprofit fund sooner. “I have already received a couple of donations in my first month, and think the fund will produce at an even higher level in the future,” said Bob Bonnar , publisher and editor-in-chief of the News Letter Journal.
• “Made it a rule that everyone we hire must be able to produce quality engaging content for our readers no matter their role,” said Kit Slack , executive director of The Hyattsville Life & Times. “It improved teamwork and organizational flexibility, and brought more timely information to our readers.”
• Charging for subscriptions on their app reversed “leaving money on the table for years,” as one southern publisher put it. “We added 2,200 digital subs last year at a much higher ARPU compared to non-app subscribers.”

If you’d like to find out where your opportunities are for digital transformation, check out the Beyond Print Diagnostic and the Beyond Print Toolkit.