NewsTechForum 2025 lightning round: AI tools target workflow flexibility, first-party data & new revenue

NEW YORK – The “Lightning Round” at NewsTechForum 2025 didn’t leave much room for meandering theories. As the moderator, I set the tone with a warning and a stopwatch: “Just like FIGHT CLUB, the Lightning Round only has 1 rule: Each presenter only has five minutes!”

Four vendors took the stage with four different angles on the same underlying pressure facing media organizations: modernize workflows, keep ownership of data, and show a measurable business reason for every new tool. (Watch the full video here.)

The Newsroom Isn’t Just Guided By A Rundown Anymore

Scott Fitzgerald, National Sales Director for North America at Octopus Newsroom, opened his presentation with a promise that sounded like a dare: “I’m not going to show you a rundown. You’re not going to see a rundown.”

Instead, Fitzgerald framed the newsroom as a system that has to serve publishing everywhere at once. “The story has now become what we do. It’s no longer the show or the stream,” he said, arguing that the story, not the broadcast segment, is the organizing unit that has to travel across platforms quickly.

That platform sprawl is why he kept returning to flexibility. “Here’s the beauty of this. Octopus is the most flexible system out there,” Fitzgerald said, before underlining how little patience teams have for complex changeovers: “What extra thing are you going to give me that I have to learn?”

The pitch was not “rip and replace.” It was “meet people where they are.” “We will never tell you that you have to be in the cloud, you have to be here, you have to be there. We work in all of those places… Because you don’t know where you’re gonna be. And one size does not fit all,” Fitzgerald told the room.

Recruitment Advertising: The Audience You Already Have Is The Market

Next, George Dratelis, Director of Partnerships, Jobiqo, made the case that recruitment is hiding in plain sight for publishers.

He aimed squarely at brand value and direct revenue, repeating the word that matters most to any media operator trying to replace lost dollars: ownership. “ It’s all about your brand, and Jobiqo is the global leader to provide you with the technology to drive revenue and to engage your audience,” Dratelis said.

Then he delivered the kind of line that makes people stop taking notes and look up: “Every single member of your audience is employed, is passively seeking another job, or unemployed. So there’s a tremendous opportunity to grow audience, to engage audience, and to generate revenue.”

In other words, even if a station’s core audience isn’t actively job-hunting, recruitment advertising can still scale, if the workflow is automated and distribution follows the audience to social platforms.

Publishing platforms: move from “content” to “capability”

David Schmeltzle, Founder of Bizbudding, focused his presentation on his Springwire platform and on what publishers can control: infrastructure, portability, and first-party data. The urgency was not theoretical. If a publisher can’t access its own audience signals, or can’t migrate easily, every downstream decision gets harder.

“We have a bunch of tools that allow us to migrate your CMS into WordPress. We run open source systems there and we have some infrastructure that allows us to bridge that quickly,” Schmeltzle said, tying open systems to speed and optionality.

His most specific concept was the “session passport,” a method for turning on-site behavior into usable intent signals: “We believe that you have a tremendous asset if you start building a session passport… where we know that somebody’s coming in for breaking news or they’re reading an article on maternity.”

That detail matters because it suggests a practical alternative to third-party dependencies: personalization and monetization based on what the publisher observes directly. Schmeltzle framed that as an asset worth curating deliberately: “Focusing on curation of these first-party assets is going to be, in our mindset, a key strategic asset as you move forward.”

Media monitoring: stop watching everything, summarize it

Closing out the lightning round, Matt Quering, Head of Sales, Snapstream, leaned into a blunt reality: nobody has time to watch everything anymore.

“SnapStream is now watching TV for you,” Quering said, describing a product direction where monitoring becomes automated and structured. He pointed to an interface approach that goes beyond transcripts: “We now run the transcript through an AI, and the AI will create chapters for you.”

The near-term payoff isn’t novelty, it’s time back, and a cleaner handoff to executives, assignment desks, and sales. Quering’s most vivid preview: “Welcome to 2026 Media Monitoring, where SnapStream covers the competition. 24-7 updates on who was booked on what programs, what topics were raised, what chyrons were run. Receive a full competitive intelligence rundown and have it delivered to an executive’s inbox.”

And he tied that to labor relief in a sentence built for any GM balancing headcount and growth: “Better support your assignment editors and offload manual processes so that your ad sales team can focus on retention and new business.”

The Thread Connecting Four Very Different Lightning Round Pitches

Despite different products, the Lightning Round converged on one shared constraint: media teams can’t afford tools that demand heavy retraining, trap them in closed systems, or deliver benefits that can’t be counted.

The session’s theme was simple: in 2026, the “AI” label isn’t the selling point. Flexibility, portability, and measurable outcomes are.

Watch the full video here.