I’ve watched media companies adopt and abandon the same technologies in the same ways for the past decade. The pattern is remarkably consistent: a new technology emerges, media companies wait too long to adopt it, implement it poorly when they finally do, declare it a failure, and move on—just as the technology matures and competitors who started earlier reap the benefits.

This happened with mobile, with social media distribution, with podcasting, with newsletters, with video, and it’s happening right now with AI tools. The specific technology changes. The failure pattern doesn’t.

The Consistent Pattern

Phase 1: Dismissal. New technology emerges. Newsroom leadership dismisses it as irrelevant to “real journalism.” “Our readers don’t use that.” “That’s for entertainment, not news.” “We’ll wait and see.”

Phase 2: Panic adoption. Competitors gain traction with the technology. Revenue numbers shift. Leadership panics and demands immediate adoption. “We need a TikTok strategy by Monday.” “Why don’t we have a newsletter yet?” Budget is allocated hastily.

Phase 3: Poor implementation. Without strategy, expertise, or realistic timelines, the implementation is mediocre. A junior staffer is assigned to manage a new channel alongside their existing workload. Content is repurposed rather than created for the new format. No metrics beyond “are we doing it?”

Phase 4: Abandonment. Poor implementation produces poor results. Leadership concludes the technology doesn’t work for journalism. Resources are pulled. The staffer is reassigned. Meanwhile, competitors who invested early and properly are thriving.

Phase 5: Regret. A year later, it’s obvious the technology was valuable and the problem was implementation, not the technology itself. But the window of opportunity has passed or the cost of catching up has multiplied.

Why It Keeps Happening

Newsroom culture values editorial over technology. Journalists become editors become managers become executives. Technology understanding is consistently undervalued in promotion decisions. The people making technology adoption decisions often don’t understand technology.

This isn’t about being technical—it’s about being literate. You don’t need to code to understand that mobile-first design matters, or that social platforms have different content requirements, or that AI tools need integration strategy. You need basic technological literacy that many media executives lack.

Short budget cycles. Media companies operate on annual budgets with quarterly pressure. Technology adoption requires multi-year investment before returns materialise. The incentive structure punishes patient investment and rewards short-term cost-cutting.

A newsletter program might take 18 months to build meaningful subscriber revenue. If the budget review happens at month 6 and the numbers look bad, the program gets cut before it could prove itself.

Vendor dependency. Rather than building internal capability, media companies buy vendor solutions. This creates dependency on external platforms that may change terms, raise prices, or disappear entirely. When the vendor relationship sours, the media company has capability built on rented infrastructure.

Talent mismatch. Good technology people can earn significantly more outside media. The talent pool available to newsrooms at media salaries is limited. Hiring junior people and hoping they figure it out is the default, and it produces predictable results.

The AI Chapter

We’re in the middle of the AI adoption cycle right now, and the pattern is exactly repeating.

Phase 1 happened in 2023-2024: “AI can’t do real journalism.” “It hallucinates too much.” “Our readers want human writing.”

Phase 2 is happening now: media executives are demanding AI strategies, worried about competitors using AI for content production, analytics, personalisation, and audience engagement.

Phase 3 is arriving: companies buying AI tools without clear use cases, assigning existing staff to “figure out AI” alongside their regular workloads, implementing AI features that don’t serve reader needs.

Phases 4 and 5 are predictable: disappointed results from poor implementation, abandonment, and later regret when it’s clear that strategic AI adoption would have helped.

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report keeps documenting this cycle. Every year the technology changes but the adoption failure looks the same.

The Companies That Get It Right

A few media organisations consistently adopt technology well. They share common traits:

Technology leadership at executive level. Not a CTO who reports to the editor, but a technology leader with genuine strategic authority and budget control.

Dedicated teams. New technology gets dedicated staff, not added responsibility for existing staff. These teams have realistic timelines and protected budgets.

Experimentation culture. Small pilots with clear success metrics, iterated quickly, scaled when they work, killed cleanly when they don’t.

Reader-centred approach. Technology adoption driven by reader needs rather than competitive panic. “How does this serve our audience?” rather than “Competitors are doing this.”

Patience. Willingness to invest for 18-24 months before expecting returns. This requires leadership that can explain the investment to boards and stakeholders.

The New York Times is the obvious example. Their technology investment over the past decade—in apps, personalisation, podcasting, cooking, games, newsletters—has been strategic, patient, and reader-centred. The results show in their subscriber growth while much of the industry contracts.

What’s Different About AI

AI adoption is harder than previous technology cycles for specific reasons.

Ethical complexity. Using AI in journalism raises genuine ethical questions about accuracy, attribution, transparency, and the role of human judgment. These aren’t excuses for inaction, but they’re real considerations that social media or newsletter adoption didn’t involve.

Pace of change. AI capabilities are evolving faster than organisations can implement them. By the time you’ve implemented today’s tools, tomorrow’s have different capabilities.

Workforce anxiety. Journalists rightly worry about AI threatening their jobs. This creates internal resistance that doesn’t exist with most technology adoption. Managing this requires honesty and genuine investment in upskilling.

Getting AI right probably requires outside perspective. Team400.ai is among the firms working with companies—including media organisations—on figuring out where AI adds genuine value versus where it creates problems. That kind of strategic thinking is exactly what internal panic adoption lacks.

The Structural Fix

The pattern will continue until media companies address the structural causes:

Invest in technology leadership. Hire or develop executives who understand both journalism and technology. Not technologists who dismiss editorial values, and not editors who dismiss technology—people who bridge both.

Protect innovation budgets. Ring-fence resources for technology experimentation so they can’t be raided during quarterly crunch. Accept that some experiments will fail.

Build internal capability. Stop depending entirely on vendors. Develop in-house skills that let you evaluate, implement, and iterate on technology independently.

Plan for timelines longer than one quarter. Technology adoption takes time. If leadership can’t articulate a 2-3 year technology strategy, they don’t have a strategy—they have reactions.

Learn from the cycle. Every media company has lived through the dismissal-panic-failure cycle multiple times. Recognising the pattern should help break it. But recognition requires honest reflection on past failures, which many organisations avoid.

The Stakes

The media industry can’t afford to keep failing at technology adoption. Revenue is declining, audiences are fragmenting, and the organisations that adopt technology effectively gain compounding advantages over those that don’t.

AI is probably the most consequential technology adoption decision media companies will make this decade. Getting it wrong—through either premature dismissal or panicked poor implementation—will widen the gap between organisations that thrive and those that shrink.

The pattern doesn’t have to repeat. But breaking it requires structural changes, not just different technology. Until media companies fix how they approach technology adoption, the specific tool won’t matter. They’ll fail at whatever comes next the same way they’ve failed at everything before it.